Today’s adventure: at the used book store

I try to go on at least one adventure every day, for the exercise. Today I was going to take a day off from adventuring, but the truth is, adventuring is kind of addictive. Plus today I woke up feeling like I HAD to go to one of the used bookstores downtown, so I went. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for or if I even wanted to buy anything until I found this:

From Drop Box

When I realized what this was, I almost cried. (Okay, not really because I am of course made of steel, but I wanted to almost cry. But you know that feeling, though. The one where everything falls away from you and you’re smacked with some deep, forgotten about emotion.) This isn’t just a teach yourself Gaelic book–I already have two of those lying around somewhere. This is THE book I was obsessed with during the fall of 10th grade. That was 12 years ago, and I was 15, and I had had barely a year of French, but I’d always wanted to learn Gaelic. I checked this book out from the Covington library. It was blue back then, but I swear this is the same book. I got to keep it for a month, and I studied hard every day. I even made up vocab tests for myself. (This was a precursor to when I would have a similar obsession with Latin seven years later.) I still remember some of it. Not a lot, but a couple phrases got ingrained in my brain, like “Tha mi sgith” I’m tired, “Tha an cat aig an dorus” The cat is at the door, and my personal favorite “Tha mi an spain” I am a spoon. I made it to plurals (SO HARD in Gaelic) before I had to take it back to the library. I think there was a hold on it, so I couldn’t recheck it, and by the time I got it back again, the fire of my obsession had gone out.

I WANTED that book, but it’s not like it was readily available–it might not have still been in print–and this was back in the days when I didn’t even have a bank account and we just barely had the internet. There was this kid in one of my French classes who had done a similar thing and taught himself French with a library book, and he had accidentally dropped the book in a puddle and had to buy it from them, so he got to keep it, even though it was a bit damaged. I was envious. I considered stealing the book so I could buy it from the library, or staging some kind of “accident.” I really wanted something awful to happen to that book so I could keep it. But, no. I couldn’t make myself do either of those things–even though I would have paid the library for it–and so I let it go. I found other self-teaching Gaelic books, but never that one. And now today I walked into a random store and got it for $5. Like, there was an obscure piece of my childhood that had at one point meant the world to me, but I could never have it, and then this morning I woke up with the urge to go to that store for no reason, and there it was.