A Ghost Book Found Me

 

Recently, I slipped into Barnes & Noble to use the restroom. Of course, I can’t walk into a bookstore without spending a little time there, so after I washed my hands, I looked around.

At this B&N, the section nearest to the restrooms was New Age items. Tarot cards, runes, books on Wicca. I glanced over the selection and saw a book called Haunts of Virginia’s Blue Ridge Highlands.

Intrigued, I picked it up, and as I frequently do when looking at local work, because, you know, reporter brain, I flipped to the back to see if there was an index that might have any places in my county listed. I idly flipped to “F” for Fincastle.

What I found instead was my name!

The book author, Joe Tennis, had listed a bibliography in the back, and he cited an article I’d written for The Fincastle Herald in 2008 as a source for one of his entries.

I bought the book. Not everyone can walk into a bookstore and find their name in it, after all.

This was a delightfully weird little full-circle moment. Of all the places to discover it, this was unexpected. I know my name is in some local history books at the museum. I’ve seen my name in emails from folks who were researching other aspects of the county, and I know some of my work has been used (frequently without permission) in various books and publications.

But I wasn’t expecting to find my name in something at Barnes & Noble while I was wandering through the New Age section. The universe apparently decided the ghost book needed to find me.

Seeing my own name in the bibliography of a published book made me realize that my work is history now – not history as in “done with it,” but history as in, many of the pieces I wrote will someday end up in other publications. Maybe cited, maybe not, but about 40 years of the story of my community lives because I wrote it up.

I spent decades gathering small pieces of local history, the stories people might dismiss as "just folklore," only to find that one of the pieces traveled beyond the local newspaper pages and became part of someone else's research.

I found the author on Facebook and wrote him a little note thanking him for listing me in his bibliography. He wrote back, telling me he remembered the first time he’d found his work cited in something else. He too wrote for newspapers and is now retired. It was a little kinship between strangers.

This was a quiet reminder my life and my work exist whether or not certain people acknowledge it. 

The story exists because I showed up. My byline is in the annals of the newspaper because I was there. I interviewed people. I wrote articles. Other people will find my work useful.

I went out and I created. No one can take that away, overlook it, or decide it didn’t count. Because what I did counted then, and it counts today, and it will count 100 years – maybe 200 years, even – from now.

It was a pretty remarkable thing to find on a random Tuesday morning.