Jerusalem, Skinny Legs and All

In the final scene of Skinny Legs and All, one of the magnificent novels of Tom Robbins, who died this week at 92, Boomer and Ellen Cherry have discovered a world not so different from one many of us would cherish.

They’ve been through a lot, and there’s nothing strange about that. Boomer and Ellen Cherry emerged from the wildly inventive mind of one of the most radical, fun, and daring writers of his generation. Time travel, a talking spoon, and multiple renditions of Armageddon between New York and Jerusalem flowed from Robbins’ pen. (And yes, he wrote all his novels by hand, always beginning a new book by writing the title and the final scene first.) After all of this and more, we find our heroes living in a small house in Jerusalem at the end of the story.

Their home has a garden, it’s an easy walk to the Old City, work is close by, and they are doing what they want to do – each urging forward some version of a messianic age simply by being who they are. This scene is perfect, actually, and had it not bloomed in a novel, it might have taken root for real a block or two from where I’m sitting in Jerusalem right now.

Tom Robbins conceived a fictitious version of Jerusalem’s beauty, mystery, and majesty that my friend Mahmoud Muna, proprietor of the Educational Bookshop in East Jerusalem, would surely share. Muna’s shop was ransacked during his arrest this week. He was being investigated for incitement. I may not always agree with Muna’s views, but he engages people and ideas with an open mind in the spirit of peace. His life’s mission, inherited from his father, is getting people the right book at the right time. We all know the adage: in places where books are burned, people will follow. Feel free to read that again. Feel free to write it down and share it with others.

Tom Robbins was a master of crafting the wildest plots that ultimately expressed the simplest needs. A great writer can draw us into a world of imagination that not only welcomes us but inspires us to live our own non-fiction world with more color, more purpose, more humanity.

The February sunshine was just strong enough to buzz in her plasma, and the light was almost impossibly clear… Birds chirped messages older than prophecy, older than tourism… She sipped her tea, drew on the pages of her mental sketch pad, and absorbed through every pore that she could open, the ancient golden light.

And so Ellen Cherry—our hero, my hero—welcomed the last day in the last pages of one of my favorite books. May the peace of that moment and those pages grace all of our tomorrows.