In the summer of 1977 the boy first found the book.  It was a very distinct looking text.  The cover was plain and unadorned, worn by many hands.  Inside, the pages had originally been stitched in, but the stitches had disintegrated with time, and many of the pages were practically falling out or only held in by staples and yellowing cellophane tape.  It was a most unusual book.

 It had been a beautiful day that July 17th, mild and sunny with a light breeze.  The boy was staying at his grandparents home in suburban Connecticut for two weeks while his parents were in California for their work.  They were in planning and real estate development and the boy was pretty sure they were thinking of moving their business to the West Coast, probably so they could make more money.  George and Margaret had been married young and the boy came along soon after.  He quite often felt that perhaps his parents regretted having a kid, as if the responsibility of caring for him was an unwelcome burden, a cramp in their style. 
 The boy didn't mind staying with his grandparents, though.  His grandmother, Edith spoiled him just enough, while Frank, his grandfather, was always working on his different machines in the garage and loved to take time to explain them all to the boy.  Frank had been a mechanical engineer starting during the world war at the then very new Sikorsky plant near their home in Bridgeport, CT.  He had helped design the helicopters that the men of the boy's father's generation had known well in Korea and Vietnam.  Frank had retired about five years ago but never got used to not having somewhere to go everyday.  Now he spent most of his days in that poorly lit garage.  Tools, boxes of spare parts, and disassembled clocks and gears had long crowded out the possibility of having an actual automobile in there.
 

That day Frank was of course working on something.  A lawnmower, the boy thought.  Edith had gone to the hairdresser's that morning to have her perm reset and had been by the IGA grocery on the way home.  She was now in the kitchen preparing a meatloaf for their dinner.

 The garage sale was actually being held down the street at St. Stephen's Episcopal Church.  Frank and Edith's neighbor, Mrs. Parkwood, was organizing it.  The Ladies Auxiliary was raising funds for an orphanage in Ethiopia, "because the poof African children have so little."  Mrs. Parkwood and the other ladies had collected donations from everyone's attics and garages in the neighborhood and put prices on them and arrayed them on folding tables in the grange hall and outside on the lawn.  Edith had donated some of her old knitting supplies she wasn't using anymore and had convinced Frank to part with a couple of radios he'd repaired but they didn't need littering up the house.  Mrs. Parkwood herself was the cashier and after selecting your purchases you would bring them to her and she would make change.  The Ladies Auxiliary had a sale like this every year, though always for a different cause, and Mrs. Parkwood always took charge of the cash box. 
 

The boy went down to the sale alone that afternoon.  Edith had already been by that morning before her hair appointment, and Frank never went to these sales.  "Why would I want somebody else's old junk anyways?" he always said.  The boy suspected that Frank just didn't like Mrs. Parkwood and was rather cheap to boot.  Frank and the boy had been on many expeditions to the town dump where Frank would uncover wonderful finds to bring back to the garage.  Lamps with a broken switch, or chairs with legs missing, he would bring them back and repair them all.
 

The book caught the boy's eye at first because it was out of place.  It didn't belong where it was.  The ladies had a special table for all the books, separated into different sections:  paperback, mystery, romance, non-fiction, etc.  But this book wasn't on the book table.  It was in amongst a table mostly filled with old tools and kitchen utensils and dishes.  The boy saw it lying there underneath a potato masher that had seen better days and a couple of green glass salt and pepper shakers.  The boy picked it up out of curiosity.  There was no title on the cover or on the spine, and when the boy opened to the first page expecting a title page and the author's name there were none.  Whether the book originally had a title page that fell out or if there never was one the boy didn't know.  Either way the text started immediately.  It was printed in this old-fashioned type face, as if the book was like a hundred years old or something, and rather than filling all the pages it seemed to only go halfway through and then stop, to be taken over by various handwritten passages and type or mimeographed sections pasted in. 
 

The boy wasn't much of a reader, but flipping through the pages he started to become fascinated.  He wasn't even really reading the text, but more so looking at all the different handwritings, the sections added on, the notes in the margins.  The book had seen lots of different hands before.  Without quite knowing why, the boy decided he wanted the book.  There was no price tag on it, and looking down the row of tables at Mrs. Parkwood perched on her folding chair, the boy knew what he needed to do.  Holding the book nonchalantly at his side he started walking down the row of tables.  He glanced back over his shoulder and saw that Mrs. Parkwood was making change for a middle-aged woman buying a slightly used set of juice glasses.  The boy took the book in his left hand, and raising up the hem of his orange T-shirt with his right, he slid the book down the front of his jeans, leaving it pressed in between the waist and his stomach.  It was the first act of theft the boy had ever committed.