Book outtakes - A Gift of Watermelon Pickle

 When we "kill our little darlings" in the process of cutting a manuscript down for the integrity (let's say) of the book project, some of our favorite stories get the axe. So Lizzy Borden, I know.

Here's the first outtake that caught my eye in one of those moments when I ask myself, "Wait, is that still in the book? Nope..." To be fair, some of it is in the book, but not the part about the Watermelon Pickle.

**

Down the hall was a huge open room, which was used as Professor Chomsky’s library and also, I soon discovered, as a voluminous storage area. I opened the door and saw books, thousands of them, thin and thick, with gray, black, white, and brightly-colored spines, some of them classics, and some, I would later learn, written by friends, colleagues, contemporaries, and graduate students. Newspapers, magazines, theses, and periodicals overflowed on the shelves, and boxes were squeezed tightly against one another on the floors and along the walls. His bibliography took up a corner section. The books he had authored filled a dozen long shelves. By then he had published more than sixty books, and most of those had several translations shelved next to them, in Spanish, Korean, Russian, Turkish, German, French. Other shelves held books, journals, and periodicals for which he had written an article, a chapter, or a foreword. The dusty room, smelling of musk, ink, old paper, and cardboard, reminded me of my school days, when I covered my used school books with light brown paper grocery bags each September.

I moved along the wall to check out his bibliography more closely. The first book on the uppermost shelf was his Master’s thesis, a thin paperback first published in 1951. I picked it up and examined it, trying to discover more about my new boss.  I would like to say the first thought I had when I held Morphophonemics of Modern Hebrew was, “I would love to read this,” but in reality I was dying to get it out of my hands.  The small green hardcover reminded me of a bound compilation of poems I read in Junior High School called “Reflections on a Gift of Watermelon Pickle.”  Both were thin, army-green volumes of six by nine inches, with dry, scratchy covers that raised goose bumps across my arms and legs – my unfortunate version of fingernails on a blackboard.  Many of the political book titles were dark and alarming: Towards a New Cold War (1982); The Race To Destruction (1986); The Culture of Terrorism (1988); What Uncle Sam Really Wants (1992). Jamie had suggested I take any book with more than three copies for my own collection, and I pulled out the Uncle Sam book because it looked readable to this Chomsky newbie. Maybe more importantly, I was relieved to discover that the cover, like all the others I touched from then on, was deliciously smooth.