Relics

I have used the same bookmark for 25 years. I got it from the old Taylors Books at Preston Center when I bought my first copies of Tolkien's holy trilogy and The Hobbit. I travelled there on a bicycle - to the sanctuary of my youth. They had a corner shop, facing north over Loop 12, positioned across a parking lot from a monstrous church with a Brobdignanian clock in its steeple. The church is still there and it still boasts a large bell that chimes so loudly it can be heard from miles away. The noise used to travel a league's distance to my bedroom window on Stefani Drive. I always found it to be a pleasant and comforting sound.

Taylors Books has long since disappeared, but I still have that old bookmark. The phrase Bookfest '82! is emblazoned across it - along with the dates November 15-20, phone numbers from before the area code addendum, and an address with the same zipcode as the neighborhood where I grew up; old Preston Hollow.

Cryptic scribbling adorns the back of it; directions of some kind, written in my sloppy teenage scrawl. I have no idea what event was taking place; if, in fact, the destination in question still exists; or at what precise point in the past quarter century I would have needed this information. I know only that, by that time, I was most certainly able to drive (judging by the distance to be travelled) and that something was afoot at the corners of Jupiter Road and LBJ Freeway.

All I had to do was take the exit, pass a gas station, drive 50 feet, turn right, and look for a sign that read "LBJ Hotel". Apparently, I had some sort of business in Room #105. Once again, there's a phone number without an area code, meaning that, whatever might have happened, it took place before the decree of the mid-1990's.

So now my life has spawned relics. Maybe I can open my own museum. I can hire Enormous John Junkill or Suzi as the curator. Aunt Sally and Joel the Groovy Old Hippie can be tour guides. All my artist friends can show their wares. We'll have such wonderful fun.

The image below presents yet another arcane artifact that might be exhibited at the Museum of Massive History. An explanation is soon to come.