The Unfettered Critic – Submitted for the May 2020 issue

Have you ever felt as though you’re in a Twilight Zone episode?

Of course you have. Everybody feels that way these days—waking up to discover that our entire planet has fallen prey to a deadly viral pandemic, the likes of which has never ever been experienced on this scale. Suddenly everything you knew about your existence has changed and the future is a murky mess.

BUT…we’re not talking about that kind of Twilight Zone episode—the sad ones, the scary ones, the ironic “if only we’d known” type episodes.

We’re talking about the very rare kind of TZ episode, the happy ones, where no one gets “wished into the cornfield” or finds out that the book that the super advanced aliens brought with them is actually a cookbook, and you’re on the menu.

There were a few. The sweet and quirky and “Wow—imagine that!” kind.

We think it’s time for a story like that right now. And so we bring to you this real life tale.

Let us turn the clock back to last summer, when Paula received a text message from Judi, a good friend in Chicago, where Paula grew up. She’d shared a lot of experiences with Judi until she got a job in the Big Apple and left the Windy City behind. Before leaving town, Paula gave her friend a number of her possessions, including, apparently, a bunch of old books that were too difficult to transport cross-country.

Judi’s text included a scan of an old college ID card from 1977, when Paula was an employee of Mundelein College, her first job following her higher education at Michigan State University. Judi wrote, “Found this stuck in a book, apparently used as a bookmark.”

Yes, it was Paula’s 42-year-old ID that she’d carelessly left behind in Chicago when she moved on with her life.

“What book was it in?” Paula asked.

“T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland,” responded her friend.

“Wow,” said Paula. “Deep.”

And then she spent the rest of the day giggling.

Flash forward to early this year, before the Earth spun off its axis. Another text message, this one from a fellow named Jason. It was another scan of a college ID card, also from 1977. Also found in a book, apparently used as a bookmark. The only difference was: this was Terry’s ID, from Los Angeles City College during his pre-UCLA days. It was in a tome that he’d recently donated to the Ruch Library for their book sale. Jason had purchased the book and found the card—and then, realizing that he’d seen Terry’s name in the Jacksonville Review, managed to track him down.

“What book was it in?” Terry asked.

“Halfway through James Joyce’s Ulysses,” was Jason’s reply.

“Wow,” said Terry. “Deep.” And then, filled with curiosity, he asked, “Why did you decide to read that?”

Verbal shrug. “I never had before,” responded our new friend. “I’m an English major and I love a challenging read.”

Wow. A fellow English major, just like the two of us. Someone who still goes to libraries and reads books!

But that’s not the Twilight Zone part. The quirky, funny, sweet, and bizarre part is that both IDs were from the same year, faded memories of two people who liked deep books and were destined to meet and fall in love a few years later.

And then lose their IDs.

O brave new world that has such people in’t!

That’s from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, by the way, in a book that will not be leaving our joint library any time soon.