absentmindedness

Remembering back, there were five places I could have left the book. These past few years I've returned to my childhood habit of borrowing books from libraries: public, church, school, institutional (the USIS in Davao City!), well-off friends' personal collections (Bong Aviola's family — he always had the latest Hardy Boys books). Soon after seeing Christopher Nolan's epic re-telling of Homer's The Odyssey, I wanted to re-read it, having forgotten most of the details from my first reading of it way back when I was in high school in the early 1970s. But when I looked up Emily Wilson's 2018 translation in the SFPL app, I saw that all of the copies had been lent out and there were more than a hundred on the waitlist. So one afternoon my daily constitutional took me to Clement Street and the Green Apple bookstore there, where there was a small stack of freshly printed Wilsons still available. Spent 20 of my rare and precious extra shekels on the volume, and started reading the…