The Unfettered Critic – December 2021/January 2022

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

Of course you have. Everybody feels that way these days—ever since early 2020, when we all woke to discover that our entire planet had fallen prey to a deadly viral pandemic. Suddenly everything we knew about our existence changed, and the future became a murky mess.

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

We’re talking about the very rare kind of episode, the happy kind, where no one gets “wished into the cornfield” or learns too late that the book the super-advanced aliens brought with them actually is a cookbook, and we’re on the menu.

There were a few sweet and quirky ones, the upbeat, “Wow—imagine that!” kind.

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

Let us turn back the clock to last year, when Paula received a text message from Judi, a good friend in Chicago, where Paula grew up. She’d shared a lot of adventures with Judi until she scored 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 heavy to transport cross-country.

Judi’s text message 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 43-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.”

Flash forward several months. Another text message, this one from a fellow named Jason. It included another scan of a college ID, again from 1977. Again found in a book. Again apparently used as a bookmark. The only difference: this was Terry’s ID, from Los Angeles City College during his pre-UCLA days. It was in a tome that he’d 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 your Unfettered Critics. Someone who still goes to libraries and reads books!

So that’s our Twilight Zone story. The quirky, sweet, funny, 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.