I can't look at a copy of Bellow's "Henderson, The Rain King" without smelling the chocolate turtles I would buy every morning from the bakery at the corner where I would catch the streetcar to work in New Orleans. Not a great breakfast, but what a smell to keep with a book locked away in the back of your mind. The reason is of course, that's where I read it, on that streetcar going to work. "Omensetter's Luck" by William Gass belongs to the front desk of Beckham's Bookshop in the Irish Channel where I worked later. "Light In August" was a tree in front of some public building on Royal Street in the French Quarter. "October Ferry To Gabarola" by Lowry, a boarding house above Canney Row. "War and Peace" on our building rooftop just below Nob Hill in San Francisco. Freud on a stool in the front area of the A & W Drive-In in Bloomington Indiana where I was working as a car-hop (yes, there were boy car-hops)
I found a copy of "All My Friends Are Going To Be Strangers" by McMurtry recently in a thrift store and almost bought it. I had lost it somewhere on a hitch-hike to LA from New Orleans in 1976 and never finished it. I decided it was too late.
Fitzgerald's short storys in the back seat of my mother's car in front of the drugstore where she worked.
Sherwood Anderson's Memoirs on my mother's couch in a moble home park in LA after that long hitchhike.
"Sentimental Education" on my long front porch on Louisiana Avenue in the Irish Channel in NO.
"Travels With A Donkey" the first summer in our new house in Westchester because all of my books were in storage still.
"All The King's Men" in Drexel Mo. where I was stranded one summer at 16.
God, they are family, aren't they. I could do a similar list with my friends and family
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