me and victor hugo

Victor Hugo was kind of a jerk. He was a pompous ass who ignored his family and had a mistress on the side. Plus, I've read Hunchback and I didn't like it.

But Les Miserables.
That book changed my life.
That book created three new lives: my children.
That book is why I got married.

I was spiritually transfixed while I read it, and for weeks afterward I walked around with it under my arm, lost in a daze of altruistic longing. I thought of giving away everything I owned (though I was a med student at the time, and what I owned was negative fifty thousand dollars, plus a cat). I thought of moving from the safe side of town to the rough neighborhood across High Street, so I could live among down-and-out neighbors and be available as a beacon of kindness and generosity, in case anyone around there was looking for such a thing. I never thought about becoming a Christian -- couldn't accept the core beliefs -- but I longed so fiercely to live like the priest Father Bienvenue, that it was like a religious conversion except without the religion. It was late spring of my first year in med school.

I'm going to backtrack so I can mention something else: there was this guy. I'd met him in early January. I had gone home over Christmas vacation, traveling by Greyhound, and on the way back to med school I had to change buses in Pittsburgh for the last leg of the trip. The bus was crowded and I took the last free seat, next to a skinny foreign guy who turned out to be a young doctor himself. He'd just graduated from a med school in his home country and was now sharing a cramped apartment in Houston with a bunch of other doctor-guys from the same university, sleeping four to a room and living on falafel and crowding around the TV with feverish excitement during World Cup season. They were all in the same situation, scrambling hard after the dream of an American residency -- the ticket to a comfortable life in a country where you could curse the president without going to prison. In fact, that's why he was on the bus. He'd been riding it for weeks, interviewing at residency programs all over the place: New England, New York, Chicago. He hoped that one of those interviews would turn to gold but he wouldn't know until late March, when all his hopes would ride on the results of Match Day: the appointed day when residencies and hopeful applicants find out how -- or if -- they've been paired off.

I'm the kind of person who usually puts on headphones and stares fixedly out the window when I have to sit next to someone on a bus, but he and I found a world of things to talk about. When I reached my stop five hours later, we traded phone numbers and I hugged him when we said goodbye.

After that, we stayed in touch by occasional letters and phone calls. His grammar was atrocious but he was a sweet guy, good-hearted, and he liked me more than I wanted him to. He called me that spring, bursting with joyful news: he'd matched for a residency and would start his intern year in July. He'd be only three hours from my own medical school. He wanted us to visit eachother once he got settled in.

His tone was darker when we talked a few weeks later. Something was wrong but he wouldn't tell me what it was. Then I called him in June, and this time he sounded even worse, with a flat voice drained of enthusiasm. I kept after him to explain, and finally he did. There was a problem with his visa. He was on the brink of losing his right to stay in the country. That meant he'd have to give up his residency position, go back home, fix the visa thing, then come back to the US and start all over again -- resubmit his applications, repeat the interviews, cross his fingers once again as the next Match Day approached. Except that it would not be possible. His father had already sold all their land to put up the money for his one shot at making the big time in America. There was no money left for a second chance.

Les Miserables was on my nightstand. My heart jumped and my mouth opened and words came out. It was my big opportunity to do good, and prove to my strait-jacketed spirit that even on the dull defined path to doctorville I could still find adventure. (And shock my mother too, into the bargain.) So I asked him to marry me. I proposed a temporary arrangement with no strings attached. I told him that all I hoped for was that, if he met someone in trouble someday, he would help her like I had helped him. Just like Valjean.

So that's my story. That's how Victor Hugo reached out from another century, grabbed me by the throat and shook me hard, and shoved me through an unexpected door and down a path that ended up changing everything.

The guy and I got closer than I'd intended and we made a go of it for a lot of years, long after the INS handed him his papers and he stood up in a roomful of strangers to salute the flag. We aren't together anymore, but we're still friends, and we're mom and dad to three kids who are growing up strong in this wild world -- where adventure waits behind every unopened door.

*************************

So that's the preamble, but here's what I've been building up to: my big idea. Instead of letting friends and family keep buying me useless gifts for birthdays and holidays, I want them to give me nothing but books. But I don't mean coffee-table books, or shiny bestsellers from Barnes and Noble that they think will suit my taste. Here's what I want:

Give me the dog-eared copy of a book you've loved at some point in your life. But first, on the inside cover, write a few lines about it -- I mean a personal note, not a critical review. Tell me what you were doing when you first read it, and who you were back then, and what you found within those pages, and why they touched you. The book you choose doesn't have to be great literature or anything. Maybe it's the book that made you realize you wanted to be a nurse, or the book that gave you solace when you were getting over a tragedy, or the book you happened to have on you the month you fell in love. Then sign it, date it, give it to me. I want a library of beloved books from beloved people, like a treasure-house of all your secret hearts.

I like to imagine that some of those books will fall into the hands of strangers long after I'm gone -- random people who'll flip open the flyleaf and read your scrawled, faded lines. And through your words and your book, they'll glimpse the lives of all you people they've never met who've walked through time and memory and left your mark. Like my Aunt S. in nineteen forty-seven, eighteen years old, when she left the Pittsburgh projects for New York's bright lights to try to make it as a dancer. Or my friend N. in her first days in this country, when she cried for her Slavic homeland, staying in a cheap hotel where she couldn't figure out how to work the faucets. Or even me in nineteen ninety-six, just starting out in medicine and living in a tiny apartment full of cat hair and getting turned inside out by Les Miserables; the year I asked my kids' dad to marry me.

So tell me, readers: what book has meant something to you? Leave me a comment. I want to know.