Bad Medicine

/ Jeff Cann

After the library book sale, I boxed up the Native American table. It’s a mindless task. Grab an unfolded box from the stack on the floor. Give it structure, the shape of a box. Maryann slashes two strips of packing tape in the shape of a cross on the bottom with her tape gun. Fill it with unsold books. Thousands of books remain. This is my least favorite part of the sale. Lots of work to eliminate unrealized earnings.

Boxing books is an art, a puzzle. Some people rock it. No dead space anywhere in the box. Every cubic inch filled with book. I suck. I lay the books flat, then spine up, then top up. No matter which way I twist them, I finish with a hole, a tunnel, a perfect square from the top of the box to the bottom, just an inch too small in every direction to fit any more books. At least my quarter-empty boxes are easier to carry. I go back to Maryann’s station to build another box.

One of the books on the table is Little Big Man. I grab it and stick it in my pile of stuff—my lunch bag, the iPads that run the book sale software, the cashboxes bursting with bills, extension cords and lightning cables, my coffee cup, empty for at least nine hours. It’s a long day at the end of a long week. But Little Big Man is a score.

I’m scamming. I already took my five free books allotted to workers. But the sale is done. Anything leftover goes to a wholesaler, pennies a piece. He will sell them or recycle them. This book won’t be missed. Plus, thousands of people have already rejected it.

~

I read the novel Little Big Man in 1994. I rode my bicycle across the United States that summer. Strike that. I meandered by bicycle across the United States, coast to coast, as far south as Albuquerque and north into Canada. When not riding, I read tattered old books from small town junk shops and journaled. I drank warm beer alone in my tent.

At the time, Little Big Man altered my thinking. Thomas Berger tells the story of a white boy growing up in a Cheyenne Indian tribe. Berger describes the culture and spirituality of the Indians. On my long daily rides, I regurgitated what I read the night before and internalized it. Unconsciously, I altered my identity to align with the story. I thought of myself as a Human Being, which is what the Cheyenne call their own people in the book, implying that everyone else is something less.

I even recall journaling in the parlance of the Indians in the story. In one entry, I appropriated the word ‘medicine,’ as used by the Cheyenne, meaning mojo or personal essence or vibe. “Caught a nasty cold today. My medicine has gone bad.” Something like that. I dug through my journals yesterday to see if I could find those sections and pull some quotes. I didn’t find any, maybe I’m making that part up.

I don’t expect the book will have much impact on me this time around. During the summer of 1994, I was lonely, lost in my own head, and maybe a little crazy after months on the road by myself. Besides, the book, written in 1964, might have aged well for its first thirty years, but by today’s standards, twenty-five pages in, it seems super racist.

How many times will I do this, reread my favorite books from yesteryear, and find I don’t like them anymore? A Clockwork Orange, Jitterbug Perfume, various books by David Sedaris. Not only has the world changed, but I have too. I’m less confident, less convinced I have all the answers. I’m not willing to laugh at or overlook appalling topics like I did decades ago. Respect for others has become one of my guiding principles. The anti-woke among us might scoff at this as a weakness. I see it as my strongest trait.

18 thoughts on “Bad Medicine”

  2. It’s fascinating that your memory of your journalling applied its own kind of medicine to contemporary recall. How common that must be, but we rarely seek or see the evidence of it.
    ~
    An interesting reflection on cast-offs.

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  4. I hate that I miss our library’s book sale. I never know when it is and I always seem to show up a week or two later. 🫤

    I keep a journal and managed to hold on to the ones from my teenage years but then the flood happened in our basement and there went my youth. As an adult I have managed to fill three fairly thick journals and I’m working on the 4th now. I used to make an entry everyday, now I’m lucky if I can remember to do it once a week.

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    • Follow your library on facebook. I suspect they post about the book sale for months before it happens. I only journal now when I really want to write and I can’t think of anything to blog about. Although those journal entries always turn into blog posts,

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  5. I loved the movie. My father-in-law is a huge fan of that period and re-reads “Bury my heart at Wounded Knee”, but is firmly of the opinion that the First Nations are all gone. That’s despite coming out to visit several times, both here in BC and down in Washington State.

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  7. I can understand how someone can no longer relate to a favorite a book or a song from one’s youth. I think this can apply to many things in life, such when meeting an old friend. In our memory, the old friend is still the funny jokester. But life changes everyone and everything, including memory.

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