Og Filled In

Yesterday, we were on our way to run some errands when my husband took a sudden right turn into a neighborhood we’d never driven through before. I immediately knew why and a glimpse of neon poster board at the edge of my vision confirmed my suspicion. Garage sale.

The sale was a block down at the end of a cul-de-sac. We pulled in beside three or four other cars. A pile of discards sat at the curb and I looked at my husband excitedly. He shook his head. “We can’t fit a wood pallet into the car and, even if we could, what would we do with it?"

“But it’s so pretty!” I said. It was, too—the distressed wood streaked with blue paint and black markings. I’m sure I could have figured out something to do with it. Garage sales do this to me. Nevertheless, we passed up the pallet and walked up the steep driveway to the sale proper. My husband son lingered at the tables in front, while I made my way straight into the dark recesses of the garage, which contained boxes upon boxes of books.

Well… some of the books were in boxes. Some were laid out individually, positioned like museum relics, despite their 25-cent price tags.That’s where I found Og, Boy of Battle. It was a plain, green hardcover with yellowed pages. The spine had been broken and taped back together. Here and there, pages protruded, ripped almost in two by time and abuse.

I grabbed Og, along with a second book (a late 1940s home medical reference) and was on my way to pay for my items when a stooped, grey-haired man came to meet me, eyes shining. “I see you have my favorite book,” he said.

“This one?” I asked, holding up Og.

“Oh, I read it over and over again as a boy!” He took it out of my hand and thumbed through the velvety-soft pages.. “Of course, you can tell by looking at it that it isn’t that old.”



“Not well-loved, either,” I said, smiling as he stopped on a torn image of three boys pointing spears at a tapir.

He held the book so my son could see. “He’s a cave boy, you know, so he fought all sorts of prehistoric creatures—snakes and sabre-toothed tigers and wooly mammoths.”

My son nodded.

The man handed the book back to me. “Enjoy it,” he said, looking at my son. “And if there are any pages missing…” he tapped his head “…fill it in from here. Your imagination. It’s better there, anyway.”

We paid our fifty cents and got into the car.

“I think I might like that book,” my son said.

“You might,” I said. I opened it and read aloud:

The great snake dwelt in the dismal, murky, stinking, mud and slime of the great swamp into which the river, that coursed by the cliff abode of the Hairy People disappeared.

“I don’t understand what you just said,” my son said.

Treacherous islands of giant reeds and canes that rattled together like the bones of skeletons in the wind seemed to float about on the slime and ooze, and long-legged gangling birds, with great silent flapping wings and sepulchral voices flew about among the trees or strode across the muddy surface with strides so awkward and grotesque as to make them appear like gnomes who might dwell in that dank and dark land of mystery.

“Um…” my son said.

I closed the book.

I have no doubts that Og, Boy of Battle exists in the hearts and minds of hundreds, if not thousands, of old men. There, it’s a tale of bravery and adventure, of a heroic boy in a dark swamp, but some stories don’t hold up through generations—not in the same words, at least. Some stories have to be kept alive other ways. I have plans for this book and I hope I do justice not to the Og on the page, but to the one in that man’s mind. The true Og is the remembered Og, not the one in encased in 1930s purple prose. The real Og isn't on that page at all. The real Og is filled in from someplace better.