Didn't My Skin Used to Fit? by Martha Bolton

had invited me to go along with her. I had never been to an antiquarian book fair before, and it was fascinating to see the vast collection of rare and antique books.
    One display especially caught my eye. It was a handful of pages from an old writing book that had been used by Mark Twain. There in his very own handwriting was part of one of Twain’s manuscripts, complete with corrections. It was fascinating— and, of course, priced well into the thousands of dollars.
    Many of the books at the show were in the same price neighborhood. There was one collection by Chaucer that was selling for, I believe, $250,000. My Visa card doesn’t go that high. I couldn’t have bought the bookmark that went along with it.
    It was interesting, though, to watch people walk from booth to booth, surveying the rare and old books with respect and excitement. One book was 350 years old. Another was 200. There were books we remembered from our childhood (not the 200 one, of course). Rare book dealers had come from as far away as England, Germany, Spain, and countless other countries to display their collections and offer them for sale. If anyone had brought a book in that was less than ten years old, I don’t think it would have gotten past the front gate.
    So what makes these old and used books so valuable? Much of the reason has to do with the simple fact that they’ve survived. It’s not easy to preserve a book for forty or fifty years, much less hundreds. They’ve seen too many yard sales, swap meets, and, of course, two-year-olds. Many books can’t take it and eventually succumb to the wear and tear.
    People are like books. Our pages may tear or turn yellow and our binding become loose. Some of our ideas might even sound dated or passé. But if we can somehow hold ourselves together, survive the elements to which life exposes us, and keep most of our pages intact, we’ll have become a rare and special book indeed.

    Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.
—Mark Twain

46

What’d You Say?
    My husband suffered some hearing damage in his years of service with the Los Angeles Police Department. Today officers are required to wear ear protectors while qualifying with their service revolver. That wasn’t the case when my husband joined the department, so the monthly visits to the firing range took their toll, and now he’s paying for it.
    High-pitched sounds are what give him the most trouble, especially background noises at restaurants and women’s voices. Even with hearing damage, though, he refuses to get a hearing aid. I don’t understand this thinking, but he’s not alone. A lot of people think a hearing aid will make them look older than they want to look. Frankly, I don’t get it. Does answering the question ‘‘Did the mail come?’’ with ‘‘No, I didn’t see the cow’’ really make a person look younger?
    Though my husband’s hearing was damaged years ago, hearing loss is also a side effect of aging. And we don’t only start losing our hearing, but our ears seem to get bigger, too. They continue to grow as we age, some of them even turning outward. Maybe that’s to give us more access for trimming ear hairs?
    I’ve found, though, that what most middle-aged and older people suffer most from is selective hearing. They hear what they want to hear. My husband can hear me whisper a Home Shopping Network order into the telephone from two rooms away, but he can’t hear me calling him to dinner.
    He can hear the rear fender of my car barely tap the planter as I’m backing out of the driveway—while he’s taking a shower in the house—but he can’t hear the telephone ringing when he’s two feet away from it.
    One of these days someone’s going to come out with a chip for hearing aids that would work like the V-chip in a TV. It could be programmed to edit out all the things you don’t want to