Yesterday in Church

Yesterday in church, there was a boy sitting on front of Angela and I, maybe eleven or twelve years old, skinny, pale, bad haircut, and I noticed that beneath his seat was The Great Hunt by Robert Jordan, which is book two of The Wheel of Time collection—easily the greatest fantasy series ever written. Some people might argue that The Lord of the Rings trilogy is the greatest fantasy series ever written, but those people have never read The Wheel of Time series, and they are wrong. In the early twentieth century, the Wright brothers figured out how to get an airplane flying. It was a landmark, an impressive feat—but I do not want to ride that first airplane.

The boy in church yesterday reminded me very much of myself. I remember following The Wheel of Time series starting when I was about ten years old, and discussing the books with friends as dorky as myself until the next volume was released. (And, since dorkiness knows no age, every now and then I’d bump into someone at the bookstore, or a friend’s parent, who read the series as well. Always a jolt of excitement, to meet a fellow lover of The Wheel of Time!)

Bringing the book to church was a classic maneuver by my little pal in front of me. It was a nostalgic moment. But, since he wasn’t pouring over it in his lap, either mom had set some strict regulations, or he was purely a car reader. I remember church being a great space for reading Robert Jordan. My older sister’s volleyball and basketball games were harder.

My love for fantasy started to fade away sometime after I went to college, and eventually I stopped following all my favorite authors except for Robert Jordan. I had read The Wheel of Time for over a decade, and I was determined to read it until the last novel was released, and I figured out once and for all what would happen to Rand—would he defeat the dark forces at Shayol Ghul? Would he have to give his life in the process? My heart said no, but what about all the old prophecies? (I had a Wheel of Time reference book to help me keep track of these important questions.)

When Crossroads of Twilight was released, I was a freshman in college, and I bunkered down in my dorm room and didn’t leave until it was finished. By the time Knife of Dreams was released, I had stopped checking the WOT website for updates, and didn’t find out until I was in Alaska. I hitch-hiked to Anchorage, and the first thing I did was go to a local bookstore to finish before I flew home. Book twelve, A Memory of Light, was supposed to be the final book in the series, the end of a seventeen year odyssey, and when I was in Africa, I checked online to see if a release date had been set—and instead, I saw a picture of Robert Jordan, with the letters R.I.P. beneath it, and a date from a month or so before.

Throughout the sermon yesterday, I kept wondering—does this little boy know? Should I stop him after the service and say, you know RJ’s dead, don’t you? That he never finished?

The story is that on his deathbed, RJ told someone the ending, and that he kept prodigious notes on the final book, so another writer was hired to finish the books as RJ originally intended-- part one (yes, the “final” volume has now been separated in three parts) owill be released this fall.

I don’t have much time for reading fantasy these days, and I don’t have all my old novels around anymore. Before Angela and I got married, I loaded all my old fantasy novels into the trunk of my Grand Am, drove to Hyde Brothers books in Ft. Wayne, and sold them for four-hundred dollars.

This was actually not a bad price for memories.