at home in the library at the end of the Earth

children used to understand and visualize a bookend with metal, bronze, or some other sort of hard material- unlike the boring metal book ends of the 20th century…and it was within those bookends in a snug little room with the hard bound covers that one found solace, romance, or adventure of the cerebral kind.

but not today…not many today…

and so many minds reflect a shadow of the intelligence that graced this Earth when children read pages, not devices, in languages, not snatches of one-dimensional verbage.

in light of this, i have devoted some of our snow-filled nights to the reconstruction of an old style library…

sans devices

sans magazines

sans flexible metal hardware.

to snuggle up in a comfy chair as it snows the whole world over outside…with a cup of warm tea and a gripping story in your hands…is an underrated, and increasingly forgotten, winter pleasure.

To all you who will snuggle up by the fire with a good book…

May your journey find you warmth, peace, and a full imagination…

the society for the prevention of hostility toward unabridged dictionaries

where have all the unabridged dictionaries gone

long time a passin

where have all the unabridged dictionaries gone

long time ago

where have all the unabridged dictionaries gone

gone to dumpsters every one

when will they ever learn?

when will they ever learn?

When I  was in school, the unabridged dictionary sat like an alien death weapon on a podium too small for the monstrosity. Most of the boys and girls in my class were afraid to even touch it. The librarian treated it like some kind of ancient relic from Remulac.

Then, one day, it disappeared. It was piled in a gargantuan book-pyramid with numerous other dishonored lonely books. The speckled-faced librarian gathered them in a wheelbarrow and positioned them behind a hideously wide red truck.

In the morning, as I walked to school, I saw the red truck parked haphazardly upon the mound beyond the northern end of the school building. I walked over, peered into the bed. Below the truck bed, a few pieces of browned paper lay scattered about,  I reached down and found they crumpled into dust when touched.

The unabridged dictionary- along with other notable books- met their death that day…before I found the remnants of ash-like fragments.

I confess today that I do not own an unabridged dictionary. Some day, I will buy one….in secret. But for now, it has become a problem.

It is because I get words stuck in my head and often have to search to find their meaning.  So many times I cannot find it in any of the mamby-pamby dictionaries online or any in the public library.

In fact, while I was writing my last post, I got a word stuck in my head. Not like a song stuck in my head, but an “unknown” (for best effects, please pronounce with a Scottish accent) word. I flung open my dictionaries, scavanged the online dictionary venues, to no avail. I nearly flailed myself upon a piece of plastic to buy a subscription to the unabridged dictionary…OK, I am exaggerating…but repented when I did some cost analysis.

The word was…

parsipitous

Yes, that’s right. Not precipitous. Not parsimony. It probably has something to do with “to parse” I imagine. But I do not know.

But surely I would know if I could just find an unabridged dictionary…somewhere.

In the blank space on the bookshelf

To everything…there is a season…Ecclesiastes claims, the Birds (not the angry ones) sang, and ’tis true. The trees, the leaves, the plants of the field, all change with time. And, so too, the ages of a man or a woman. And this we all know by a particular age- or will one day know. But life is so much more complicated than that, as Plan D changes into Plan E, so far removed from the Plan A we dreamed about when we were still wearing teenage haircuts and sporting waistlines that somehow elude the present evolving pull of gravity. Life is a complicated stretch of seasons, and often those seasons do not come into complete focus until they pass on…

So I sit by my computer contemplating how it has taken me three years to discover the principal spiritual purpose of this particular season, and why, after all this time, I failed to see the season for  what it was- only a season. In our great intelligence we believe that somehow this season will last so much longer than the previous one…but often that is not true.

Seasons, like an old bookshelf or bookcase, have bookends. Today, I rarely see the portable bookends, but the analogy should be recalled in order to understand how a life’s season is set. Chapters of each seasonal saga form books in our lives, and these are set off by the bookends- a beginning one and an ending one. Most of the time a dramatic event marks a solid bookend, and we know then that a transition stage- the blank space on the shelf between the sections of books- will take over until we are firmly established again in a pattern of books that make another season.

It is to this blank section on the shelf that I have jumped, not finding a bookend nearby yet, and hoping I do find that solid bronze or metal reminder, identifying the beginning of the next season. I do not fear this space, it is neither purgatory nor limbo, it is simply a space. I pray it remains blank until I can plainly see the other bookend. Meanwhile, I can watch the other leaves of books accumulate around me, as each person collects more seasons between shelves of this library. And soon it will be my turn to set the bookend against a new book, a new chapter, a new season in the continuing sage of life.