An Accidental but Fortunate Find

Went into the dollar store yesterday to get a box of garbage bags so i could put away the Christmas tree. I didn't need a big box of them -- only one which was large enough to hold my little 3' tree and keep the dust off it while it's on its hibernation in the shed outside until next Christmas. Anyway, the dollar store was close, the prices were certainly good and I knew they had what I needed.  Turns out they had more than just the garbage bags, TBTG.

There was a small table with books on it. Ok, normally I don't do my book buying at a dollar store but I usually look. This store seldom had anything much but what the heck. Lookin's cheap, ain't it? 

First I saw a book called "The Secrets of Judas."  Ok, that looks mildly interesting and for a buck, what the heck. Then I saw it -- or rather, several copies of it. I found Jan Karon's A Continual Feast, One of the Mitford books but the book that was different. "Words of comfort and celebration collected by Father Tim." I nearly danced in the aisle as I grabbed a copy as if it were the last one in the world before slightly more sedately heading for the aisle where the much more prosaic (but still quite useful) garbage bags lived.

 A Continual Feast was a key book for me about 2006 when the book came out. I'd enjoyed the series of course; it was like being back home even though I was about 2370.23 miles away, more or less. Opening the books I could just about smell the grass after a rain, the heady scent of magnolias and honeysuckle, the tang of wood and over it all, the faint hint of salt air from the river just over the hill and down the bluff.

A Continual Feast,  however, was a book of sayings supposedly collected by Fr. Tim. Bits of wisdom from this or that writer, theologian, poet, humorist and the like fill the pages, each of which is set either in a handwriting font or as if typed on a typewriter (complete with strike-outs to remind us that this was from someone who didn't have a computer but rather something like an old Remington that didn't self-correct. It is a book I can open to any page and find something that resonates with me, succinctly put and full of profoundities. See why I was so excited to find it?

It even prompted me to keep a small journal of things I ran across that made me think or that I wanted to be able to find again (there's no chance I could remember them all).  That little black composition book, small enough to fit in my purse but usually there on my desk or bookcase, The quotes cover all kinds of things and I used to use the book frequently for blogging or for when I felt i wanted to write something but didnt' really know what to write about. My little book, inspired by Fr. Tim's (and sometimes using Fr. Tim's) provided me with a lot of inspiration -- and probably more than enough words.

So it's not a high-brow literary giant like, oh, I don't know,  Fr. Raymond Brown's immensely in-depth study of the New Testament or the Oxford Encyclopedia of Christianity, or even something lighter on the order of Molly Wolf's essays or my copy of Julian's Cat but it still has things to say to me that I need to hear.

The quote on which my eye fell when I opened it just now?

God allows us to experience the low points in life in order to teach us lessons we could not learn in any other way. The way we learn those lsessons is not to deny the feelings but to find the meanings underlying them.  -- Stanley Lundquist, Professor of Psychology, Cal State U.

Then there was:

Life is God's novel. Let him write it. --- Isaac Bashevis Singer

Maybe the book I found at the dollar store is my spur to start adding to my own little book of famous quotes, maybe even to start another. I only have a dozen or so blank pages left out of the 80 sheets in the book and lots and lots of things I've read that I want to remember. And maybe it's time for me to open the book and look for things to ponder. It's a sure-fire cincch there's something in there somewhere.