Freeman, wife of City Manager Mike Futrell, alleges the city defamed her without investigation or due process and attempted to silence her protected speech and civic engagement.
Welcome back, you postal ponderers and vacation correspondents. Last week we sent our imaginations out into the world on postcards—brief missives of scenery, weather reports, and emotional expressions. Did you write to someone from a place you invented? Cut up a few postcards and reassemble them for a new perspective on place and being? Perhaps a hunger drive inspired a snack menu for a long road trip? However far your postcard traveled, I hope it delivered a few minutes of creative play.
This week, we’re staying in the same general neighborhood of paper and memory, but moving from “Wish you were here” to “I am here.” Our creative nudge is a bookmark.
I own plenty of bookmarks; they are nearly effortless to acquire. I find them in bookstores, gift shops, libraries, and sometimes tucked into used books like tiny time travelers from someone else’s reading life. I like them. I keep them. I save them in responsible little stacks.
And yet, the moment I need one, every bookmark I own goes into hiding. I assume they gather somewhere under the furniture, laughing at me while I reach for whatever is nearby: a napkin, a receipt, a business card, or once, in a moment of questionable literary improvisation, a raw angel hair pasta noodle. Not recommended.
I use digital books too. Shout out to Libby and the Riverside Public Library; making it possible to borrow books without finding pants or parking. I listen to audiobooks, where the bookmark is an invisible timestamp. I appreciate these choices I get to make. I am not anti-technology. After all, I am typing this on a machine that contains more computing power than the systems used to send people to the moon half a century ago, and I mostly use it to look up whether a word is hyphenated.
I enjoy using old technologies. They help me make sense of new ones. A bookmark is a memory saving device. Many times I’ve tried just “remembering the page number.” That works about 50% of the time. Bookmarks work 100% of the time unless human error is involved, and human error is often nearby in my household.
A bookmark needs no battery, no two-tier login requirements, no software update, no customer service chatbot, and no subscription tier that unlocks premium page holding. It helps me remain an analog human being in a world that keeps getting automated, chrome-finished, optimized, and digitized to remove all the rough edges and minor obstacles we sometimes need in order to learn and grow.
Will the bookmark become obsolete? I doubt it. We keep inventing ways to save our place because we keep needing to stop in the middle of things. Life interrupts. Notifications ding. Kids cry. Someone needs to know where the scissors went. Even in a fully digital world, we need ways to mark where we are and what deserves another look.
So, find a bookmark. A real one if you can. Or appoint some flat household object to serve with honor. Then let it hold your attention for several minutes with one or more of these page-saving creative nudges:
A Mark of One’s Own: Make a bookmark designed for the book you are reading, the book you wish you were reading, or the person you wish would read more. Use cardboard, junk mail, a cereal box, or even a used postcard! Add a drawing, a quote, or a five-word book blurb.
Page Turner: Invent a wildly complicated device to replace the bookmark. Think Rube Goldberg for readers. Maybe a marble rolls down a ramp, knocks over a spoon, releases a tiny flag, and activates a fan that gently blows open the book to the correct page. Draw the machine, describe it, or build a tiny prototype from objects on your desk. Make it less convenient than a bookmark in every possible way.
Bookmark Billboard: Gather several bookmarks and repurpose them into a poster, collage, or visual map of your reading life. Arrange them by color, size, mood, or imaginary importance. Add words or drawings. What does this collection say about where your attention has been? What kind of reader does it advertise?
Placetime Continuum: Spend a few minutes thinking about the ways you are like a bookmark. Where do you hold a place for someone else? What unfinished chapter are you waiting to return to? Are you marking a spot in a relationship or project? Write a short reflection, poem, or note that begins: “I am saving this place because…”
Book Learning: Make a list of objects, phrases, or inventions that use the word “book,” then add a few new ones of your own. We already have bookends, bookworms, bookcases, and book reports. Now invent a few more: booksnack, bookshadow, bookspine-tingle…bookweather? Define your made-up word; use it in a sentence. Bonus points if you convincingly weave it into a conversation without getting called out.
Good stories do not always happen in one sitting. Neither do good lives, good art, good friendships, or good ideas. Some of the best things require us to leave and come back with refreshed eyes.
As our reading, writing, listening, and thinking become more digital, outsourced, and smoothed of every rough edge, it may be worth spending time with the old artifacts of literacy. Pens. Paperclips. Library cards. Bookmarks. These objects remind us that learning often happens by finding your place, losing your place, making a mark, then starting again.
This column was written with help from ChatGPT, which does not read for pleasure yet remains surprisingly enthusiastic about helping analog humans sustain a love of reading and writing.
