The Wall

Few people get past our front door. It isn’t that we don’t like visitors, we don’t like rearranging our dust, animal hair and clutter so the visitors can safely visit. If someone does visit, it’s not unusual for DW to hiss, “There’s one crossing the kitchen.” Which prompts me to leave a guest while I stomp a rolling mass of animal hair, thick with dust, as it streaks from the back rooms determined to engulf the visitor.

If the condition of our dwelling doesn’t convince a visitor they have entered a madhouse, (barking, jumping, slobbering dogs tend to welcome visitors as they step through the door) the lack of a television usually does. The clincher, as far as discomfort goes, seems to be the wall where books are stacked. Books are piled on any flat surface: chairs, tables, counters, a dog crate. (The cat won’t tolerate his crate being piled with books he’s not interested in reading.) Books occasionally overflow onto the floor.

Sometimes a visitor will approach the wall to scan the titles. There are bread books, cookbooks, food preservation books, wine making books, archery books, fishing books. Books on barnyard livestock, horse breeds and their care, and nature in general. Books on writing, embroidery, gardening, mead making, organic orchards, drawing, painting, aquarium fishes and histories. A longer glance reveals tomes on mushrooms, Christianity, Paganism, guns, herbs, art, Shakespeare, O’Henry, Plato, Fantasy & Science Fiction art, Maps of War and “green” witchcraft.)

I’m at a loss when someone turns from the wall and asks, “Do you play golf?”

I don’t, too much hand/eye coordination required. They want to know why I have a copy of “The Encyclopedia of Golf”. How do I explain that? Or the three books on flying gliders and airplanes, or the copy of “Morals and Dogma, a Freemason book of rites”? I don’t fly and I’m not a Mason, free or otherwise. In all honesty, I have no idea what all is on that wall, or piled along it. I usually shrug. Why do I have these books?

I haven’t read most of them, have barely skimmed the bulk of them and probably have forgotten the ones I have read. There must be a reason for my buying them, for coating them with years of dust. It can’t be that I want to impress someone as so few people have been in the room with them. Maybe I hope to someday get around to reading them? (Not likely. I can’t keep up with the few books I want to read now.) More likely, I think they contain information I’ll need someday and I don’t trust the library, or the digital age, to keep them safe and handy against the day I need them? (I know this isn’t some midlife crisis crap. I’ve been a book hoarder since the 5^th grade!)

When I have no musical group I’m obsessing over, or audio book I can listen to at work, I listen to “talk radio”, sometimes even local “talk radio”. With the election of a more conservative county government, I’ve been hearing talk of cutting funding to the county’s public library system, or incorporating it into the public school system. The latter idea would pretty much end my using the library as anything more than a pickup/drop off point. (Which would probably be a relief to those patrons who’ve endured my endless rants and boring stories when I visit the library as it is today.)

One of the local radio talking heads recently suggested that we no longer have need of libraries. We all have access to the internet and everything anyone could possibly need to know is stored there. I pondered that statement from one of the county’s wise and considered that I don’t have a cell phone let alone a smart phone, which led me to wonder how I’d identify a cabbage-munching bug while in the garden without access to the In’ernet? A paper book field guide to insects of course. Then I got to thinking about my being able to find everything I need to know online.

I’m evidently out of the main stream (who’da guessed?), as I often can’t find even a hint of what I want to know via the Net. Maybe if I had a “smart” phone the Net would cough up what I want to know? I’ve gone through as many as 23 Google search pages without finding what I was looking for. (Statistically, most people seldom look beyond the first 3 or 4 listed sites Google kicks out. Which might explain why people sometimes look at me oddly when I try to explain something I’ve read off the Net. They never get that far!)

After spending hours, sometimes days, searching the Net I finally give up and go to the library. I usually find what I need a few minutes after talking to a librarian who happens to be trained in finding information. While the librarian might use a computer and even search Google, it is usually a book sitting on a library’s shelf somewhere in the state of Maryland that turns out to contain the knowledge I’m seeking, not some website.

I understand the need to cut government spending in the county, the state and the country in general. I applaud and vote for those who claim their goal is fiscal sanity. And I understand one of the few taxpayer funded institutions I have any use for might be the one to get cut the most.

So I’ve taken to building a private library, often from books discarded by the local libraries. I learned a couple years ago that a handful of other readers and a few churches (most of them better educated and all of them smarter than me) are building their own libraries. I’m not the only one who isn’t finding what I need online. Nor am I the only one thinking it’s going to be needful to have real books at hand some day, possibly soon.

What bothers me most is having better educated, more experienced people than I, asking me to create things they think will prove useful in the near future. Like a recent request for a tutorial on arrow making. While I understand the reason for a tutorial, I’m not the person to create it. So I head for the library, which it turns out, does NOT have a book on such. Nor could I find one via the state’s library search engine. While I suggested the county library acquire several books on making archery equipment, I’ll not hold my breath waiting to see them in the card catalog. Nor will I whine and complain when I’m told such books aren’t of interest to enough patrons to justify shelving them. (The latest teen vampire romance novels have the top funding slot after all.) I’ll buy the archery books sooner than later as they need be on the wall.

Those of us with private libraries need to start locating each other. Perhaps cataloging what we have and arranging to share among ourselves should need arise?

I need to blow the dust off my books first.