~ Monday, April 30, 2001 ~

 

2:20 p.m. I close out this month with a photo that does my heart good on so many levels ...

... I remember the day I took it, of course. Not the exact day, but the type of day. For the last two months or so I've been going over to the neighborhood book store, which just conveniently happens to be in the same huge shopping center as the dentist, after my trips to said dentist.

Call it a reward, because I most certainly do. I may not buy any books, especially now that I have to pay for each and every tooth in my head, but it's still a reward to be able to wander the aisles and to look. Look at the books.

They always promise so many things, and sometimes (oh yes!) they even deliver. Just one single book could be the one -- the one that changes your life. Oh, yes.

I particularly like the "Staff Recommendations" rack, and I always read the little notes that hang there on the edge of the shelf. I wonder if the staff is coerced or compensated or just happily volunteering their choices, and even if they are real people. I'm sure they are.

Notice that one of our very own books (Peter Lance's The Stingray) is on the shelf in this photo. That is another level of joy, and it was a nice surprise, as well. Little things like that usually make my numb jaw feel oh so much better, I tell you. I would have smiled, if I could have.

So, I leave this month just as I entered it -- surrounded by books. Still in love with them, in all their forms and incarnations.

Still working through the night on them as well, to the detriment of everything else: scraggly plant life, sloppy closets, gritty floor surface, no matter what, no matter. Still falling asleep with them, still dreaming of them, still waking up with wholly formed versions of them; I wish I were joking.

I also wish, here in the middle of the night, that my huge monster of a PageMaker file wasn't suddenly acting up and tossing out fonts now that it's growing past the three-megabyte mark and I'm only one-third through with my linking and cross-references.

I know I'm bulging out at the weak far side of yet another envelope that I've attempted to push, and it's only a matter of time before I break through and the whole file shreds and I'm going to have to start all over again. You can trust -- that for every book on every shelf a similar tale of woe could be told.

In any event, we now leave the month of April behind and run open-armed and warm-blooded into the precious month of May. If you go to the dentist twice a year, as suggested, you will have appointments in May and November.

You leave the dentist with the little card in hand, glance at it and wonder how different you might be when the bristly month of November blows your way again. It seems so far away, so different. How will you have changed? Improved?

Depends, among many other things, but not least -- on which books you read. I'd pick up the meditation book, if it were me. Just a suggestion.