So, yesterday, my beautiful wife needed to be early for church to prepare for singing with the octet (choir proper being out for the summer), and she needed to stay after service not because she was naughty but because she had to practice her trumpet for playing during next week’s service. Which means I had to do something that I haven’t had to do for a number of years: I had to pick out a carry book.
Gentle reader, you might remember my concept of a carry book. Generally a paperback, and often times a seriousish book in case anyone asks what I’m reading. I carried the, well, carry book to places where I’d have a little time to sit and read. I brought it to the dojo in the days where we would spend three or four hours at the martial arts school between two boys in kids’ classes and then parents in adults classes to close the evening, or I would carry it to church to read during the Sunday school hour when my children took and my wife taught, or I would have it in the car when I was waiting to pick my boys up for school.
Well, gentle reader, those days passed and took a couple hours of reading a week from me. Ay, me.
At any rate, as I was saying, I was looking for this book to carry with me to church (c’mon, I know, the Bible would be an obvious answer, but I’ve already read that, and the Orthodox Bible I’m working my way through is a bit larger than I wanted to carry). So I went looking for Letters from a Stoic by Seneca which I just bought the day before.
And I could not find it.
I mean, I know I shuffled the stack from Arkansas onto the shelves in my office. So I put the books most recently purchased from ABC Books onto the shelves in the hallway. And they disappeared.
I spent a number of minutes looking at the shelves, and I knew they were only in the outermost rows of books on the shelves–that is, not on the rank of books behind the front row of books which holds untold treasures that I have not seen since 2016 (is it time to dust again? so soon?).
But I could not find it, so I settled on another.
I joked with my beautiful wife about how happy I was to have found a used copy of a collection of Seneca and that I would be equally happy when I found it again in a number of years. I did not mean to make it quite so true so quickly.
