On this day, in the middle of that most self-centred action of modern life, the Google ego-search, I find the places where my name appears in ether of cyberspace. And more unexpectedly I stumble upon memories and dust.
The intangible shelves of an online bookshop I can only imagine as dustless, but I am searching for a link to a website that might be selling my new book. I intend to include it on my website just in case one of the five people who visit each month is interested in buying it.
They say you can find anything on the web. And you can: cats that look like Hitler or cartoons dedicated to the theme 'monkey punch dinosaur'. I can watch the weather track across the continent as we collectively pray for rain. But I didn’t expect to find memories. Certainly not memories that belong to a time before you could say, "Just send me an email."
Here in the mess of book titles I opened up a window to display the finer details of my book like the ISBN and the number of pages. There I noticed one other book that showed up though my search as a similar title. It was about librarianship in the prison system. Tears welled in my eyes.
The book was written by my father’s brother in the late 1970s. He died aged thirty-three. I was six years old. I didn’t really understand what a brain tumor was.
It is listed at Amazon UK, but there are no copies available, at all. I’m not even sure it is a book, so much as a published pamphlet. Wherever copies of it lie, they are most likely buried under a pile of other books.
Uncle Neil, as I remember him, was a tall man. He was the first librarian at the high school I eventually attended. I remember doing searches in that library by the date of purchase while trying to find books that he may have labeled, may have touched.
How does a person who died two decades before the internet took hold end up a part of it? Uncle Neil was no celebrity, just a librarian who practised his trade in prisons and schools, someone who left an adoring wife and beautiful son. Celebrities end up online, sure, but not an everyday person with a thick, red Ned Kelly beard and gentle eyes hidden