“They’re Weird People, Mom”

 

My babysitter Mary Ann uttered that phrase when I was about 11 years old.  I think her name was Mary Ann.   She only babysat that one time.  I will be interested to hear from my two younger brothers when I tell this story if and how they remember any of the events from Mary Ann’s failed attempt at babysitting.  It was the mid-seventies in North College Hill, a suburb of Cincinnati, Ohio.  Sitters made about 75 cents an hour then.  I paid attention when my mom was working out the payment terms making mental notes so I’d know what to charge when I got old enough to babysit. 

I’m thinking it was about 8:30 or 9:00 at night.  My parents had probably gone to dinner and a movie, a date night.  Good for them.  They certainly deserved it.  Dad taught college English at a local university and mom had just graduated from law school.  I think she was in the process of preparing to pass the bar exam.  At the time I didn’t appreciate what an awesome feat it was to not only get through law school but to pass the bar exam on the first try while caring for three children.  My brothers Chris and Marty would have been about 8 and 5 years old, respectively, the night Mary Ann came to give my parents a well-earned night off.  They must have been upstairs for the night already when all the boys showed up. 

I was in the dining room reading my book. I was usually sitting somewhere reading my book.  I was short and chubby with barely discernable breasts. I was awkward and nerdy with long straight reddish-brown hair which I parted in the middle. I had freckles on my nose, and I was prettier back then than I knew at the time.  I remember I felt like an ugly duckling, a misfit or sorts.  I believe then that I would never get married or have children, because no one would want me.  I would become a doctor or a lawyer like my mom. Mary Ann was in the living room watching tv when there was a pounding at the door.  She answered and let at least half a dozen teenage boys into our house, giggling and telling them they had to keep it down. 

“Um, Mary Ann, can I talk to you for a minute?” I cautioned, “We are not allowed to have boys in the house.”  She laughed and told me I shouldn’t say anything to my parents about it.  She told me to be cool.  She called me a goody two shoes. I tried really hard to be cool, but I was so not cool with any of this.  One boy started up the stairs but she talked him into staying on the first floor.   Then a small contingent of them headed into the kitchen and started rummaging through the pantry and the fridge. 

“Hey, that’s our food.  You’re not allowed in there. My mom and dad will be really mad,” I tried to reason with the boys.  At this point Mary Ann was back in the living room, and I think she was making out with one of them.   A boy whose face I can’t remember laughed at me and said I should let them have some food, that I looked like I had had too much food already.  Another one said I had pretty hair but I should watch my weight or I’d be a fat pig before too long.  I felt tears welling up but my anger and indignation rose above it, and I yelled, “You boys better get out of here or I’m calling the police.”  We had a yellow wall phone in the kitchen with a rotary dial.  The boy who warned me about the horrors of becoming a fat pig fished my mom’s kitchen shears out of a drawer and said, “Well if I cut this phone line, that’ll make it pretty hard to rat on us.”  

A third boy took the kitchen shears out of his hand and said he was going to cut my hair off if I didn’t shut up.  I screamed as loud as I could.  We lived in a townhouse.  Maybe neighbors would hear me through the walls.  The boy came toward me with the scissors but I ducked under his arms and fled from the house.   I don’t know what they did after that. 

I ran across the parking lot to one of the other townhouses, to Mrs. Curry’s house.  She always seemed to be home.  She was a “stay at home” mom.  We didn’t have that phrase back then.  All I know was my mom didn’t work in the school lunch room or make it to the PTA meetings.  My mom worked at a legal publishing company during the day and went to law school at night.  Adults like my girl scout leader and some of my teachers would talk about my mom working as a source of pity towards us. But I was so proud of her.  I still am. The tears were flowing by the time I pounded on Mrs. Curry’s door. 

Then it’s a bit of blur. The police came.  I think they talked to me and asked me what happened.  My parents were still out for the evening.  We didn’t have cell phones or even pagers.  If they had found a pay phone maybe they could have come home sooner. 

The next image in my memory is me sitting on the edge of my twin bed with the big yellow flowered bedspread.  My brothers are asleep in the room next door.  They have bunk beds, but since I’m the oldest and only girl I get my own room.  Mary Ann is downstairs and her mother has come to bring order.  Her mother has to explain to my parents her daughter invited a bunch of boys into their house and the police had to be called to make them leave.  Mary Ann’s mom is laying into her pretty hard and asking her what she was thinking, how could she do something like this, and lamenting how embarrassed she is. 

Mary Ann’s only defense was, “They’re weird people, mom.”  I was supposed to be asleep but I tore down the stairs, fresh tears flowing, and screamed at Mary Ann, “NO!  You’re weird people.!”  She was talking about my parents and I felt like she was talking about me.  For some reason this comment zinged me worse than the food and fat pig remarks.  Mary Ann’s mom told her daughter to apologize.  She hugged me while I sobbed into her bosom. She stroked my hair and told me Mary Ann didn’t mean it, and it would be okay.  She made me hot chocolate and sent me back to bed.

Why did she describe my parents, my family as weird?  It seemed like an insult at the time.  My parents were loving and smart and funny. They were liberal progressive hippie types.  My dad’s book collection took up a whole wall in the living room from floor to ceiling. The dining room had become a makeshift law library for my mom. 

 

I don’t remember anything else about that night.  I haven’t thought about it for decades.  I’m 55 now and my parents are gone so I can’t ask them.  I wish I had asked them.  It’s strange how seemingly unrelated things can trigger such strong memories.   My husband and I live with our cats.  Our children are grown and have their own house and their lives.  Because it’s just the two of us we joke a lot.  A couple weeks ago I said to my husband if someone were to bug our house and could listen in on our conversations, they’d think we were really weird people.  And it all came back to me. 

I wonder where those boys are now and what they have done with their lives.  I wonder if Mary Ann has kids of her own and if she left them with babysitters.  I’m weird people, and it’s okay. 

The Covid Floor

THE COVID FLOOR  

I went to my first confirmed COVID facility yesterday, and I listened to the press conference while I drove there.  The Governor announced that Dr. Acton was stepping down. “NO!” I shouted in my car.  And then I shouted, “What the f—k?!” I couldn’t blame her.  In her farewell speech that following she thanked her “protection team.”  Why should a physician/public health official require a protection team?  She needed and probably still needs one because of the protestors clustered together outside her home, some with guns.  She endured death threats and anti-Semitic slurs and personal attacks—all for simply doing her job. 

I pulled up to the COVID facility where I was scheduled to conduct an onsite survey.  The majority of the work would be completed by phone and online, but I had to put the news about Dr. Acton out of mind and focus and gear up because I was “going in.”  I removed my watch and my wedding ring and sanitized my hands.  I donned my N-95 mask, sanitized again, and headed in carrying my clipboard and a big bag of PPE (personal protective equipment). 

There was only one entrance to the nursing home and there were big signs posted that said NO VISITORS.  I flashed my Ohio Department of Health (ODH) badge and the receptionist who was also the screener buzzed me in, took my temperature, and had me sign a statement regarding my signs and symptoms and my activity in the past 14 days.  I passed and was directed to an office near the front where I sanitized again and donned the rest of my PPE-a face shield, a gown, foot coverings, and gloves.  I had balked at first when my work sent me gloves, but it worked because I didn’t touch anything but my pen and my clipboard for the entire visit.  We weren’t permitted to bring our computers inside or even sit down in order to minimize our time in the building.

The Administrator walked with me in her N-95 mask and pressed all the buttons and opened all the doors.  The second floor was reserved for the COVID positive residents.  On the elevator ride up, the Administrator and I stood six feet apart.  What struck me most as we walked the halls was how quiet it was.  I’ve been in hundreds of nursing homes but I never experienced such an eerie quietness.  There was the hum of oxygen concentrators, but all of the residents were in their rooms in their beds.  Each resident room had its own stash of PPE in a little plastic dresser just outside the door.  The brave staff, the nurses and nursing assistants and housekeepers wore N-95 masks and face shields. The didn’t don the heavy-duty PPE unless they had to enter a room.  They nodded to me quietly as I passed them.  This was a good facility, but they had confirmed COVID cases in the double digits despite all their hard work. 

“I wish those people that harassed Dr. Acton were here walking down this hallway with me. I wish they could see that she was never the enemy.,” I said to myself as I passed room after room.  Did I mention it was so QUIET? I was only in the facility for 30 minutes total.  I thanked the Administrator, told her I had no concerns, and went back to the office to remove all my PPE except for the N-95 mask which I didn’t remove until I was safely inside my car.  I carefully placed it in a paper bag in my trunk so I could throw it away when I got home. 

Driving home I thought about Dr. Amy Acton, our leader.   She wasn’t my direct supervisor but she was the head of our department of about 1100 employees.  I had always liked her, long before we knew there would be a pandemic.  I liked how she sent us emails and video messages that started with “Dear Colleague” and ended with her signature closing, “Be well.”  I liked that our director was a healthcare professional and was a physician, a medical doctor, with a master’s degree in public health.  I really liked that a strong smart woman was leading us.   She came to our surveyor meeting in 2019 and addressed us, and I thought, “Wow, this lady is really passionate about public health.”   Her passion was contagious.  I met her face to face once.  She shook my hand because it was long before COVID.  She asked me what I did for the ODH, and when I told her I was a registered nurse and a nursing home surveyor, she looked me right in the eyes and said, “Thank you for your important work.”  I have replayed that scene and her kind words to me over and over in my mind, long before COVID and even more after COVID.  For me it was like meeting someone famous, and I guess she is kind of famous now.  People all over the country know about her. 

Dr. Acton established the ODH COVID 19 information line in early March 2020.  It is staffed seven days a week by ODH employees from nine in the morning until eight at night.  When I first learned that my “important work” would now include working shifts in the call center from my house I tried to answer every call the way I thought she would do it.  I tried to convey the same compassion and calm reassurance with which she addressed the entire state of Ohio during the press conferences or when she sent us employees a video messages or the brief time, she spoke to me directly. 

In one of the early press conferences Dr. Acton said about the fight against the coronavirus, “I am not afraid.  I am determined.”  

I’ve never served in the military so I’m not sure if the analogy quite works, but I feel like I’m a soldier in the army and our leader has had to retreat for safety.  But I have to keep fighting and continue to serve.  We all do.  The virus is still very much with us. It is not time to declare victory yet, but I am not afraid.  I am determined.  

 

Reflections

“Brrrrrrt”

The sound of the trucks tires running over the warning track of divets which divides and skirts each lane of the road. The shake of the chassis can be felt in your feet and hands on the wheel. The design is to alert drivers who may otherwise not be paying attention to the divergence of their direction away from the road. It’s effective, almost spoiling, as some claim one can drive “by brail” in an alerted state. We are on our way down Nevada 95 South. A new direction for us but nothing new with respect to being on the road. Though, a new feature of the warning track caught my senses. Reflection.

It had begun to rain when we left Oregon the day before. Rain is a minor challenge on the road, but for us having been stationary for so long  and the dry season just beginning it has felt like a welcoming party. The rain has not stopped on our journey South East. The only uneasy feeling is that of not knowing which spots of the roads my become susceptible to hydroplaning. Hydroplaning occurs when there is enough water and momentum to surf the wheels off the road. This causes the tires to slip as if you’d hit ice only worse because the force of the water will wrestle the steering wheel. An can operator can lose track, over correct, and quickly end up in a dire situation. Luckily the road, unfamiliar to us, hasn’t generated such spots. None the less my attention even as a passenger is on the road.

“Brrrrrrt”

This time something else caught my senses. There was an image in the divets. Of course, there was nothing in the divets but a level plain of water, but as they passed along sequentially they collectively projected an image, like a motion picture. This motion picture was the clouds in the sky and each divet a moment of it as it passed. It dawned on me that each divet is completely unaware of what it is projecting, no reflecting. Besides being a rectangular pool of water or how coherent their collective image was, each individual reflection was a subjective observation. The reflection took into account all and only the parameters of the viewer and the subject they reflected, not the pool of water. The divets only serves as a point, the water a substrate, the succession of them a sense of change, the sky a subject, and my viewpoint an observation of the collective projection. All together I was provided perspective of the sky, were there was no sky at all.

“Brrrrrrt”

I then wondered, If I were looking at a different point, I would see a different window? A different substrate a different reflection? A different sequence a different sense of change? A different , an entirely different sense of information.

Topic: Coinage

Author: Chris Dunn

I sit tiny on the giant chair clutching my mother’s hand and staring up at the ghostly image pressed against the brightly lit background. The room itself is incredibly white and bright, but the box with the pictures is brighter still. Two ribcages sit on the box’s left-hand side. They look to be nearly identical and are washed in a crimson-hue compared to my boring, gray, projected torso. When I inquire about them, the man in white informs me they are for another patient and feature contrast dye which gives them their distinct color. This clear, present day, HIPAA violation fails to shock my young mind, it being far more concerned with the apparent inequity of my bland, colorless chest shown beside. You can barely see the outlines of my ribs, but clearer than anything is a large, perfectly round circle in the center. The doctor nods and records his notes using a device like a CB radio, “Case number ####. We have Christopher Dunn. Age 3. With a penny in his stomach.”

The day had started out so normal. My siblings and I were all loaded in the back seat on our way to celebrate the first day of the 4^th of July weekend. I don’t remember where precisely we were headed, but given the time, it was likely a lake or a trail or a fossil-filled creek bed. My family was much more of an outdoor bunch in my early days. The infant Marty would have been strapped between my sister and I, as we sat buckled in place by the complex, airline style seatbelts in Debby, our ’65 Mustang. A day of fun and sun awaited us at some distant destination, but we would never reach it.

Bored, as only a child can be, the blurred miles passing outside my window providing no entertainment, I amused myself with the small pile of coins I had somehow come to possess. “Don’t put those in your mouth!” Mom had insisted. So, of course, that’s where they were. Her back was perpetually turned, and her attention sapped playing navigator as she always did, so I was free to explore my defiance. I wasn’t going to swallow them! How stupid would that be. See! I can push them around with my tongue. I can store them between my teeth and my cheek. Take them out. Put them back in. I can even roll them around on the back of my tongue and then pull them back forward. I wonder how far is too far…

“Oh, shit!” One went down the back and will not come back out. I can feel it back there and though I know, on some level, that it is too far gone, the fear of “Trouble” fills me with a panicked adrenaline. I begin desperately trying to hock it up like some metallic loogy, but my quiet retching only succeeds in alerting my parental units to my plight. “Chris?” mother asks. “Chris, what are you doing? Are you okay?”

I was reluctant to confess, but panic had pushed out fear of punishment. I had done it! I had swallowed the coin, just as she told me I might. She also said I could choke on it if I did! Was I choking? I needed help! So boldly I declared, “It went down.” As if it was the coin's fault. Even at the young age, I was skilled at the art of dissembling. “A penny.” I continued to retch, hoping that if I might yet dislodge the coin that this would prove the worry unfounded.

There were questions, panic and directions from the front seat, but I paid little heed. My attempts at performing a simple shaman’s trick failed to reproduce the swallowed object, but they had made me fairly nauseated. “I’m going to puke!” I announced, and a towel was stretched across my legs. I vomited on the towel – so much for our beach plans – but no coin was found.

Next I knew, my father snatched me from my seat and carried me in a desperate rush toward a red sign saying EMERGENCY. I recall being impressed when he vaulted onto the loading dock in a single stride unburdened by my weight. “I need a doctor!” he demanded as he cradled my tiny form. The nurse at the desk heard the panic in his voice and immediately went for help while I took in the bright, white room. A sharp, antiseptic stink clung to the air and the chairs were filled with dour  people their faces draped in various stages of annoyance, curiosity or boredom.

What followed was my first X-ray and then a fairly typical doctor’s visit. Choking had been avoided and the coin had been located. The doctor’s boredom at my case was in stark contrast to my parent’s panic. “Nothing much to do,” he said. “You just need to check his stool for the next few days to make sure that the coin passes.” That didn’t sound so bad, but I was too young to realize that “checking my stool…” would require my mother to don gloves and physically search through all my solid wastes in one of the most mortifying moments in my then young life. For what seemed an eternity (three days in fact) I had to shit in a bucket and then watch hopefully as my mother quested for the lost coin. Like everything she did, Mom tried to do it in good humor, but it was hard to hide her disgust.

I think she kept the coin as a reminder for me of what I had put her through. If I ever dared to question her advice or love, she could pull it out and say, “Remember this!?” I did – and do – remember. For years afterward, I would ask, “Do you still have that penny?” The first few times she would produce the envelope, but eventually it was, “In a drawer somewhere…” Until one day, I stopped asking, and the memory faded to the background shenanigans of youth.

Then, 50 years later, you’re going through a drawer…

Topic: School

Author: Chris Dunn

As the familiar windows with the rounded-corner panes like giant cathode ray tubes slip past one after the other, each step bringing me closer to the reckoning I both dread and desire, I steel my courage with desperate gulps of oxygen, hoping still that this might yet be a dream - that I might still be saved from the sacrifice for which I volunteered. I walk close to the wall to delay the reveal for as long as possible, some sixth graders gathered at their designated pre-school rally point by the north doors, have taken noticed and their whispered and pointed jeers prod me forward despite my faltering steps. The road behind me is closed. There will be no retreat.

Unable to contain himself, and by now, well aware of the fate that awaits him, Marty charges ahead, bolting around the corner before I have a chance to stop him. I pull up short as I hear the wild hoard lay into him as they’ve done every day this week, rabid fourth graders with no mercy or restraint finding joy in tormenting a young pup for being different. I stare at the blacktop as I catch my breath by the sloping corner wall eyeing the driveway to my right that exits onto Laboiteaux away from the carnage I hear to my left. Perhaps, I could run. But, no. There’s nothing else for it but to plunge in. No matter how slowly you pull at the bandage there will always be that tearing moment of ripping release. I turn the corner.

Marty is fighting to make his way to the safety of the first graders running wild outside the other building, heedless of the proper dread a school day should impose on their boundless joy, but too many of my classmates ring around him for him to make any progress forward in the vicious scrum. They taunt and poke, pulling at his protective cap while showering him with abusive nicknames and unclever puns. I hear him, without judgment, throw me to the wolves that tear at his limbs. “You should see my brother!” he declares.

The implication is immediately absorbed by the mob, its import never in doubt for a second. They release the smaller billy goat gruff and turn as one gleeful firing squad to stare up the cold asphalt at larger prey. One of their own? Can it be? I see the sheer delight in Tony Peters’ eyes as they fall on me, seeing the out-of-place baseball cap sitting atop my head and instantly comprehending its purpose and the hidden bounty beneath. Like a frenzied shark, he thirsts for the kill, and this boy is one I’d call my friend. As a single solid organism, its sole purpose to revel in this moment of estrangement, they swarm towards me, fresh mockeries already on their tongues. Marty casts a quick glance back to see me engulfed as he races to freedom. I do not blame him. This was what I wanted.

There had been a time, the night before when I could have said no. The haircut had been proceeding as usual. I sat in the dining room, a towel pinned around my neck, mother administering my standard cut – shaggy but still in conformance with the standards of Catholic school: out of the eyes, off the collar and ears. I could have kept my fool mouth shut, but in my mind the echoes of my brother fourth graders tearing down my brother-actual day-in/day-out hammered me. My pleas for them to cease were futile. All efforts at reason and diplomacy had failed. But there was one thing I could do. One way to make the madness end and assuage the guilt I felt at my helplessness to stop my fellows. As mother paused to adjust her grip on the scissors, I met her eye. “Is it too late to ask for a buzz?”

Topic: School

Topic: School

I’ve had a lot of schooling. I got my bachelor’s in English in 1989, my associates in nursing in 1995, and my master’s degree in health administration in 2001. But it was my year and half of LPN school that probably taught me the most. 

I decided to leave being an English teacher and start nursing school in 1990.  The quickest path to transitioning to a career in healthcare was to become a Licensed Practical Nurse first.  As a nursing student I saw, smelled, and experienced things that I still can’t forget.  The memory of the first time I saw a pressure sore on the backside of a 90 year old patient, the kind that you can put your fist in, is with me to this day.  It was in LPN school that I first saw somebody die, watched open heart surgery, and got comfortable doing things I never thought I could do— things like giving an enema, cleaning and replacing a glass eye, giving injections, starting IV’s, taking out stitches, inserting urinary catheters, and doing dressing changes.  

My most memorable patient in LPN school was a 24 year old mom named Tracy.  She had been hospitalized for 6 weeks following a motorcycle accident and had her leg in traction.  When we did our medical surgical rotation it was unusual to have the same patient two weeks in a row.  During my first week with Tracy I became proficient at “pin care”, which involved using sterile q-tips dipped in saline and pushing gently around the metal pin going through Tracy’s leg.  Our instructor used the analogy of having newly pierced ears.  If you don’t clean and move the studs going through your ears, the skin will start to adhere to the earring post.  It was the same thing with Tracy’s pin going through her leg.  Actually it was more like a rod than a pin, and I as I did her pin care I stepped outside my body and watched myself in disbelief.  I said silently, “I can’t believe I’m doing this.  I can’t believe this is my job now.  I never thought I would be able to do something like this.”  

The next week Tracy was scheduled to be discharged.  One of her discharge orders was to have her catheter discontinued.  I had removed catheters a few times before.  It wasn’t a big deal.  You had to insert a syringe into a port in the tubing and remove the saline from the balloon inside the bladder that was keeping the catheter in place.  In fact, it was such a routine procedure that my instructor wasn’t in the room with me.  I had been checked off it by that time.  

After two months Tracy was anxious to have her catheter out and gone.  I followed all the steps in my mind, but when I got to the part where I was supposed to pull out the catheter I felt resistance.  I double checked the size of the balloon.  I made sure I had removed the right amount of saline.  I gave a gentle tug on the catheter again.  It was supposed to slide out.  That’s what had happened when I had done this before.  But it wouldn’t budge.  Tracy cried out in pain, and I stopped.  She urged me to just pull the damn thing out.   One of the hospital nursing assistants ran in because she had heard Tracy cry out.  When the nursing assistant saw what was going in she handed me some bandage scissors and said, “Why don’t you just cut the catheter and pull it out? That’s what the real nurses do.” Tracy agreed.  I told them I needed to find my instructor.  As I left I heard the NA and Tracy question the competence of “student nurses”.  

My instructor got the charge nurse who assessed Tracy and called the doctor.  They took Tracy down to surgery and a urologist ended up surgically removing the catheter.  Somehow it had adhered to the inside of her urethra.  My instructor used the whole thing as a teachable moment.  She pointed out to the class that if I hadn’t followed my instincts and stopped the procedure, I could have seriously injured the patient.  I still have nightmares about what could have happened.  

I learned in LPN school to trust myself and to listen to that still small voice inside.  I learned not to give in to peer pressure and that if something didn’t seem right, it was a good idea to stop and think it through.  

I never saw Tracy again.  She had been discharged when we came back the next week, but the charge nurse told me that she had said to tell me thanks for being her nurse.  

Topic: Books

Author: Chris Dunn

“Books are shit.”

I was absolutely shocked! I couldn’t believe he had said it. This was Karl, after all. Karl, who was responsible for half the books in my personal lexicon. Karl whose taste had informed mine since puberty. He’d recommend authors, I would read them. He’d loan me books, sometimes at the point of insistence. “Here, you need to read this.” I would eye his bookshelf and try to decipher what secrets he was hiding. Why had he never offered those books? He’d brought me Elric of Melnibone. He’d introduced me to Nine Princes in Amber. And here he was, with no real passion in his voice, his words just falling dead as if from a spiritless shadow, declaring it as simple fact, ‘Books are shit.”

It was such an odd turn, I had to unpack it. Karl had only recently landed what, to us, had seemed a dream job, working at Half-Price books. We’re talking rows and rows of books and RPG gaming supplies, DVDs and more. He’d have first crack at everything coming in and an employee discount on top of that! Soon he would have the richest, fullest library, and perhaps, I might gain some small measure of spill-off volumes for my own shelves. How had this dream turned nightmare? Whence came this dark cloud?

It turns out, it’s a little like asking someone who loves steak to work in a slaughterhouse. The first day, he explained, they sat him down to watch training videos. The first was titled, “For All Those Books…?!” It detailed how every day, sometimes several times in a day, someone would walk in with a box (or boxes) – the collection of a lifetime – expecting to be made whole, to find the answer to their current, financial woes on the shelves of their years, and it would be his job to tell them the harsh truth. They would not get half of half-price. They would be lucky to get one-tenth of half-price, and here was why. The video went on to explain, what would become his life for the next few months, forking over a few dollars, grabbing the rare re-sellable tome from the pile, and then chucking the rest in the dumpster outback – a dumpster often filled to the brim already with other people’s once cherished possessions. It did not take long for this practice to remove all the former magic that obtaining the latest work from his favorite authors had once kindled in his heart. Books were no longer special. The pang he felt for those books lying unread and headed for the incinerator, had to be muted and killed just to get through the day. It was a sad sight to see, like Tinkerbell’s dimming glow after drinking poison. I resolved never to work that close to the publishing industry! I would keep my love alive.

Recently, my father passed away, and I was faced with the actualization of a gnawing suspicion which had itched at the back of my mind for most of my life, what to do with ALL of his books – 6,000+ at my brother’s estimation, over 100 full shelves at my count. Even after all of his children and grandchildren and extended family took everything they wanted, there were still a numbing number of books to deal with. We held an open house, invited everyone on our lists and sat for hours as booklovers poured over his mighty works, most leaving with a box full to add to their own growing hoards. (Karl among them) Still, I had to go up the next day and box up the shipment for the library. We used all the boxes they provided, all the boxes my brother had on hand, and had to buy several more to carry the remainder.

So, how… How do I avoid Karl’s grim pronouncement? How do I avoid that very logical despair? I just have to work to remember the joy in the man’s eyes every time he opened a box from Amazon as if it was a gift from the universe just for him. Remember how he delighted whenever one of my own titles arrived with their glossy covers. He was my editor and my greatest supporter. I asked him as I was growing up in the shadow of those towering bookshelves, “How can you possibly read all these books?” And he’d explain, “Oh, most of these aren’t ‘reading’ books. These are ‘buying and having’ books.” So, even though there is no room in my home for all those tomes, I’ll box them up and ship them to the Friends of Library, confident in my imagination that they will find new, happy homes.

Clap your hands with me if you believe in books!