A Bookish Moment

Flipping through a book catalog is a bad thing to do on a regular basis, when your house looks as if it will disappear beneath the mounds of books at any moment. But, in spite of that, I still do occasionally lose my head and peek through one of those wonderful catalogs that arrive in the mail.

I was flipping through the Daedalus Books catalog while hubby boiled some eggs (yes, he cooks) when I saw a familiar author's name: Gerald Durrell.

"Hey," I said to the spouse, "there are some books by Gerald Durrell listed in this catalog."
Blank look. "Who is that?"
"An author you've read."
"No, I haven't."
"Yes, you have. Remember, he wrote a book called The Overloaded Ark? You read it a long, long time ago."
"Never heard of it."
"We still have it, I think." At this point, I hopped up and walked to the nicest of our shelves, looked upward and plucked the book off the shelf.
I held it up. "See, this is the book. I think you really liked it."
Hubby squinted at the book and proclaimed it unfamiliar, so I told him the cover designated it as a travel book and I thought it was a memoir. He shook his head, again, and then stopped and stared.
At this point, the little bell finally rang over the husband's head and he said, "Oh, is that the one that -- where does it take place?"
The back cover said Africa and I read the blurb. Ding, ding, ding. Now, he remembered and started to babble happily about the book and how great it was; and, of course, I was laughing at my husband's funny tendency to shove aside certain bits of information that are just naturally filed in my own brain. We're so different.
Still, it was a nice moment.