The Bookbinder's Bag

The legend never mentioned that the wizard would look like my father. Same boring head, bald and wrinkly. Same bulging brown eyes, hemmed in by unruly brows. Same substantial nose, squarely planted in other people's business. Same lumpy cheeks, scarlet apples high up on his face until the wars, after which those two sour patches fell darkly into the chaos of his smile, a smile that never knows what to do with its teeth.

No, the legend never mentioned any of that.

The wizard, unlike my stump of a father, changes his height in accordance with need. When he chooses to be, he’s tall. High as height itself he goes, to draw his long, bone-thin fingers around the edges of cumulus clouds to tickle the bellies of the giggly stars, and more than once I think he does precisely that.

Should the wizard prefer, he's small. Small as possibility, taking on the exceptional height of a dandelion, and every bit as free to float his seed upon the wind.

But the wizard does not possess coldness, not like my father possessed coldness. Nor does he hoist about a big pot belly. Nor does the wizard have my father's broken bits: Left leg lost to the wars. Humor lost to his marriages. Sense of purpose lost, too, and that, well before the bridge collapse.

He's also a stranger, to me and to my sisters.

By all accounts, quite unlike my father, the wizard is a living, breathing, jovial fellow. But none of that matters now.

What matters is not the wizard. What matters is his azure bag.

##

That Bookbinder's azure bag knocked the ever-present boredom right out of my fuzzy yellow socks. That bag contains--if I can trust you to keep a secret--that bag contains the most magical things in all the world.

##

And so it begins, in a clearing in the forest with a stranger who looks like my father, but isn’t. That’s it. He appears. He shows up. Boring. Not even a ring of smoke to announce his arrival. Anti-climatic is what that is. And he calls himself a wizard?

Since legend failed to share the Bookbinder's time of arrival, we didn’t know when to gather, and naturally life goes on. Can't be expecting us to lay off chores on the mere possibility that the legend might come true. Even when legend claims a wizard soon will be arriving at your castle gates, we can't just stop our working. Not that we have a castle, or gates, or any expectation of a wizard manifesting on our stoop of green. Because we don’t. What we have is a shack with barely room enough for the six of us. And what's ours is chores, which wait for no one. Even if you happen to be one of six daughters of a man who looks an awful lot like a wizard.

Thus it was that after several sleepless hours--hours my sisters spent dancing with fireflies and wamperwillies and gigglyfrogs--we set about living. I don’t take kindly to legends that bring my sisters harm or cost them sleep or play with their heartstrings, so I was thinking to myself, This wizard's bag best be all it's cracked up to be.

I’m not much for shivering in the shadowy belly of the forest, splitting wood and hauling it to the pyre during the emptiness of winter. I'm not bugging off just to catch a glimpse of some no-account party magician.

Then we heard it: Music! Or rather what passes for music round here. Sydney was in the barn. Jeanie, in the meadow. Bethie, in the chicken coop. Amanda and Courtney, out riding horses. For my part, I was still in the forest's belly splitting wood.

Wherever we were on the island, we heard it. The plucking of strings, the disharmony of bad chords. It caught our attention. Of course there's not a lot of cello playing on the island, seeing as we don’t have a cello.

It wasn’t tuned. That’s the first thing we noticed.

The second things we notice is how he’s taken it upon himself to pull up a stump and plop himself down. He's chosen the height of a hockey player--that great one father spoke of long ago. I'd never seen a hockey player with my own eyes, but there's no doubting that's what he is. His sweater makes it clear.

Seated there, like a potted plant in a hockey sweater and padded pants, no witnesses circled round and no puffs of smoke circling his bald head, he starts jamming. With the cello. Doesn’t even care he lacks an audience. What kind of wizard is that?

Can’t fault him for making a commotion, of course. He had to do something to get our attention. Might as well try music. We love music, my sisters and I. But if I were a wizard, I’d make someone else play to announce me, and I'd insist on horns and drums and singing. Not cello. Cello slips cold and lonely into bone and lives forever in the marrow. Not the kind of thing a wizard ought to want as a first impression.

Oh, and I’d have fireworks and water balloons and polly-cakes and whistle-trains and lemon-scented sciddler dragons. Nice ones. Not the fire breathing meanies seeking revenge on frightened island folk. No, there’s no cause for that.

Oh, yes, my sciddler dragons would spray arcs of well-trained water. They'd happily share their water-giving gift, those kindly, rainbow-faced, green-tailed water cans for trees and flowers!

##

By the time we noticed that the wizard’s cello had stopped playing, it was nearly morning. Greenwich Tea Time.

The spell he cast had completely worn off.

##

So, what have we learned? That the legend is real. Whoop-de-do. I'm thinking: This guy seems pretty normal, looks like my father (from what I can remember), and he's a bad musician. Doesn't speak a word. Doesn't do much of anything, honestly. If he's meant to impress me, well, he doesn't.

What I will admit is impressive is how The Bookbinder managed to materialize on the island, what, with the bridges being long destroyed. I’d like to know how he managed to pull that off.

But truthfully, I was gutted. I had expected him to speak with a timber that shook me to my roots. I longed for him to say great and wondrous things -- mysterious things. If he said special things to us it would mean that we, too, were special.

But this wizard remained silent.

##

So, there we were, awed and excited (my sisters) and impatient and irked (me), gathered round, soul crunching off-key cello at last stopped, the lot of us drawing closer and closer to the wizard, our pink tongues held. None wished to offend.

At once, we six arrived at the same unavoidable realization: The legend so often recounted on our island had not, at all, in any meaningful way, prepared us to actually meet a wizard of legendary status. How does one properly welcome a wizard, let alone The Bookbinder? Should we bestow gifts, or might that offend? Should we extend a grateful hand, or might that be utterly unbecoming? Is a curtsey in order, or is that arcane? None of us knew.

And so we stood, still, eyes to the ground, allowing our silence to roll out to greet him. It must be noted that my sisters were all smiles. I frankly felt the need for pouting.

And then, boom! It happens. This time with a flourish. The Bookbinder stands. Bang! His shoulders shake. Boom! Little earthquakes zap across the island and the island is a flutter. And yet, the wizard doesn’t even notice. These tremors cost him nothing. No pain, no displeasure, no frustration. And then his cello changes!

The cello becomes a book. A little black book, with more words crammed inside than I knew could exist. Then wowza! The book's a lion, roaring. Next a bicycle--exactly like the one I had a long time ago. Next a plant of incalculable size, with tremendous jutting stalks, and huge eyes wherever petals form. The petals' eyes are kind and green and happy, just like Mom's. Blossoms burst forth, and below each blossom appears a sputtering of perfectly black snow. Bone-black and brilliant. Such breathtaking depths of snow, and such stunning beauty. A striking, orange-blue sky erupts into a twinkle. We watch awed as the world overhead fills with sparks flickering like fire-diamonds.

Before I could commit the moment to memory, poof!, the plant's a robin. A red-breasted robin making cooing noises and singing words. Actual words. English and Spanish, Italian and Farsi, German and ... Well, I couldn't quite understand them all. If only this robin would slow her song such that I might follow. But it’s no use. The words pour out an ocean, all tongues becoming one sweet recipe my soul can understand. I weep at the sound.

The majestic robin has her life’s work ahead of her, and it begins this very moment. She delivers at my sisters' and my feet the most perfectly speckled-blue egg anyone has ever seen. Instantly, it grows. And grows. The egg, at first no bigger than an acorn, expands bigger than a hockey puck for a giant. It splits itself in two, each half flying up a sleeve of The Bookbinder’s peacock robes--and when exactly he put those on is anyone’s guess. Two grand hands emerge from the depths of those robes. Not human hands neither. No, these are hands made of eggshells. And they’re cracking! From my vantage point, taller than my sisters, I see a mixture of light and shadow dancing beneath the fissures. My head is spinning.

The Bookbinder’s eggshell fingers lace together, weaving a web of strings. The more he weaves, the more pronounced a shape each string takes on. Coming together to form one object, the strings manifest a pouch. This is the most magical, beautiful, perfectly perfect azure bag I have ever seen or imagined, and it is the size of an ocean. I’ve never seen anything lovelier in all my life. My eyes scarcely contain their bliss. A smile, like new life, breaks wide across my face.

The azure bag is stitched from shell and sky, earth and water, with traces of fire, metal, and wood--all things that live and breathe and die and live again. Here, in this azure bag, are all the emotions I’ve ever felt, and new ones I've failed to comprehend.

With each emotion that surfaces, the cracks in The Bookbinder's hands sprout branches. The Bookbinder, for his part, is transformed. He becomes a magnificent old-growth white oak. I dare say, he makes a happy tree, ancient and new all at once! He is large enough to stretch to fill the world's one true sky. So near is he to us that we can taste the honey-breath sloshing inside his trunk. His honey-breath seeps through his bark, forming giant marbles of amber, and trapped inside each marble is an answer.

Our gasps are audible.

Now this is an entrance!

“It’s true!” tumbles out from Jeanie’s giddy mouth. She blushes, her face as auburn as her hair. Her hair, coiling along her back, falls to the earth to take root deep in the soil. My sister becomes a tree, a red maple. And she is smiling!

Amanda gushes, “They’re purple!” She nods her knowing nod. I expect to see a purple tree, given that Jeanie had turned into a roaring fire-red maple. But no, such was not the case with dear Amanda.

“Aren’t they the most exquisite pants you’ve ever seen?” I heard her say as the pants overtook her where she stood.

“Purple pants? Wait. Amanda, come back," I cry. But she was gone. A giant had taken her in her grasp and was stitching patches in her inseam.

The Bookbinder wizard-tree morphed into roots, decked out in peacock feathers, silver satin, and acres of sweeping black linen. Were these not clothes The Bookbinder had worn earlier in the night? I could not recall. All I could think about now were the branches, branches sprouting out a million tiny azure bags, each of which looked just like the one I’ve dreamed of all my life.

I looked to catch the eyes of my sisters, all but Jeanie and Amanda who were living their new lives. But I saw no one else stood near me. But I felt them even still.

##

Several minutes or hours or days later--when exactly is irrelevant--The Bookbinder begins telling me his secrets. And he won’t stop talking, and I wonder why I’d ever had an issue with his silence. He teaches me words are sacred--never to be wasted. So I pay attention. He says, "Wisdom is knowing which words are wasteful, when, and which are not."

##

The Bookbinder asked me what I want from this one life. I looked into his eyes and said no words. And still he understood so completely.

In time, he whispered into my ear, “And so it shall be.” And into my pocket came a key. My fingers collected it. I knew what spaces it opened. A place revealed to me, once, long ago. The space was deep inside me, where it has been all along. I used the key to unlock its door, and there it was: More money than we could ever spend! $20 thousand, $20 million, or $200 billion, I couldn't say. But it was more money than we could ever need to fix the world. All bridges would be restored, that we might come and go freely. My sisters’ happiness was assured, as were their fulsome educations. Here too was love and understanding, and the confidence to begin. And all the food our tribe and their tribe and other tribes too could ever need. And health. Sanity. Laughter. Pleasure. Music. Compassion. Safety. Security. Family. Friendship. Respect. And dignity for all. It was everything I could imagine!

Everything I could imagine except for Time. I’d taken time for granted. How could I forget to include it? The most precious thing of all.

##

The Bookbinder left, we can’t know when, without a whimper or a cough. And he’d eaten all the polly-cakes. I wasn’t concerned. We could bake more.

Just before he vanished, or perhaps long years after, he whispered in my ear a final lesson. “No one ever has enough time. No point wishing for more of it. The bag cannot contain it. Spend yours well. I trust no one needs to tell you how, sweet daughter of mine.”

***

Copyright © 04/25/2019 by Christy Munson. All rights reserved.