Yeah, I cheated a little with this one. But there aren’t numbers in the alphabet so I figured I could get away with it.

Our Bookbag book that starts with D but not really is 100 Days of Solitude by Daphne Kapsali.

This wonderful book is a memoir, wherein Kapsali records her experiences each day of her 100 days of living alone on a small Greek island, a far cry from her life in London. During these days, she lets life come as it may, casting aside the “standard” responsibilities of an adult human and seeing life’s small and occasionally hilarious moments in full color.

Take, for example, the time she locked herself out of her house (where she’d left the stove on) after venturing outside for rosemary.

I performed some sort of comedy, headless chicken routine, whereby I did a few circuits of the yard, entirely without purpose or logic, and then ran up to the front door and threw myself against it, shoulder first, like I’ve seen in films.

She goes on to tell how she recruited a neighbor named Simos, “a man possessed of his senses,” to break a window and gain entry. When the day was done, she left us with a parting lesson:

One thing’s for certain, however: spontaneous cravings for rosemary are not to be trusted. If you ever feel such a thing taking hold of you, do not heed its call. It’s the devil’s work.

What makes this book special, though, is what I would call life truths, which most of us have lost in our busy lives. On more than one day, Kapsali says our lives are comprised of moments and that by minimizing them, we not only lose part of what makes life interesting but also the ability to just be.

I haven’t shaken it off yet, this instinct we have to annihilate our moments, to turn them into dust and build them into hours and days and weeks and months and years, just so we can look back and see all these piles of time that we’ve collected, burial mounds of dead time, because we didn’t have the sense to live the moments that it’s made of.

Honoring our moments: it seems so simple, doesn’t it?

Also in my Bookbag: Dave Barry’s Guide to Guys

What D titles are in your Bookbag?