I lent my twentysomething friend Dejan a book about a year ago — The Naked Civil Servant, by Quentin Crisp.  It was a mistake, I knew at the time, not only because it was not his speed (he's into these dreadful vampire books), but because the book, dog-eared and scrawled on, had, oddly enough, deep sentimental value to me:  it was a gift (and clearly inscribed to me on the inside cover) I was given on a long-ago trip to New Zealand, and the scrawling in the margins and on the last several blank pages and back inside cover were essentially my on-the-fly travelogue.



Maybe there's a generational — and there's certainly a digital — divide at work here.  It may be a sign of how devalued books have become in the age of kindles and iphones.  I mean, I came of age in a time when if someone lent you a book, I don't care how dog-eared or dog-eaten it was when it came into your hands, it was a testament to friendship, a sign of sacred esteem, and you treated it as a treasure. 

Or you could look at it as a test.  I have ended friendships because a book came back to me with a creased spine. There was no big scene, but when I saw it, I silently resolved I would go no further with such a person.  And I have never regretted such a decision.  It's just one of those things.  You lend someone a book, it's both an IQ and an EQ test. 

It's so rare for me to lend my books nowadays — I have been in Boston full-time for five or six years, not nearly long enough to have friends I'd entrust with a book — that when Dejan said on two occasions "the book you said you lent me" it was a stinging reminder of my misjudgment.

I finally had to say "I said I lent it to you... because I lent it to you."  It was like an admission of guilt.  And stupidity. 

I've made peace with the loss of the book.  It was my own carelessness with it, after all, that resulted in its loss.  I mean, it'd be like asking Jake to water my plants while I was away.  I should fully expect to come home to not only find them all dead, but for Jake to be like "what plants?" when asked about them. 

We all know he'd be all: "Oh, those?  Dude, are you sure those weren't dead already?  Are you sure you asked me to water them?  Why would I water a bunch of dead plants?" And so on. 

I'm a lot more laid back than I used to be about this sort of thing, as hard as it is to believe.  I'd like to think that I would be less annoyed if Dejan had not repeated that annoying phrase "you said you lent me", but he did, and I'm not.**
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*12/27/2010 3:30 p.m.:  Dejan has just texted to tell me he's found the book I said I lent him.  So now I feel like the shnook.  Still, the next time I get the urge to lend him one, I'll remember Anita's sage advice, and just send the kindle version to his iphone instead.

**12/27/2010 3:45 p.m.: I took out the part about not entrusting him with anything precious.  That might have been a little harsh.  I still wouldn't recommend it, but I didn't have to say it like that.  Hopefully he hasn't read this yet.