Book 'Em

So, yesterday, we dropped off a couple of tons of books at the Book Thing of Baltimore, the wonderful eleemosynary institution that gives books away to anyone, any weekend day, except when they are recovering from a terrible fire, which they currently are. But check them out online and see if you couldn't swing by there one Sunday soon and drop off some of those pageturners and spellbinders you're finished with.  These people process and give away a world of information free for nothing, and the world is better for what they do. 

Fig.1 - some of the Great As
Yet Unread 

Used to be, I saved every book I read, on the grounds that I might want to read it again. But two things now have come together to make me want to give them away (except for the ones I just CANNOT live without - Ring Lardner, Tom Wolfe, J.D. Salinger, Truman Capote.)  A, I now realize that I just might not live forever, and therefore I cannot plan to be around for 40 more years, and if I started tonight re-reading all the books I own, I would not finish by 2057.  And that doesn't even count the stacks of books purchased, but as yet unread (1/6 of which is here in fig 1).

And 2, it now dawns on me that even if, somewhere down the lovely road of life, I wish to re-read a book I have given away, I can get a new copy from Amazon toot suite or even faster on the old Kindle.

That's that. And then, we left to take a nice walk on a brisk March day, and headed for the 1/4-mile track at my alma mater Towson High School. It was a perfect day to walk four times around the track while overhearing bits of conversation among lacrosse moms that one might not hear anywhere else in the world ("Kelly wants to dye his hair green for St Patrick's Day but I'm afraid it might stain the inside of his helmet") and seeing boys and girls playing Maryland's great game on a synthetic turf field.

But.  Someone has to tell me why, on the walk from the parking lot to the track, I had to deal with people letting their dogs run loose on the school campus. The law is quite clear in our county that all dogs and cats off the owner's property must be on a leash. You can hold that page in the county code up to the light, turn it upside down and backwards, and you'll never find an asterisk* that says "All animals have to be on a leash except for Stinky, because everyone loves him when he comes running up to you and places his muddy paws on your shoulders and slobbers down your back." If you want to let your dog run free, either buy some acreage out in the country, or take Stinky to one of the county dog runs. 

Everybody thinks everybody loves their dog, and everybody is quite wrong quite often, if the dog is running loose.