Maybe this is the moment to reflect.
Our family was inconvenienced, apprehensive, frequently frustrated but not infected. That didn’t make all our troubles trivial but they were not catastrophic. We were lucky. Very lucky!
Ironically, our daughter and son-in-law have preferred working from home and one of our two sons and his wife have used the time at home with their infant daughter to great effect. The other son works in a well-managed and relatively safe environment. His wife, a teacher and nurse both, was at home to supervise their two active sons, for whom on-line school presented little difficulty and with the use of a sports park right across the street. As for the two of us, our greatest trouble was only being stuck at home with those wretched train horns.
Looking back now and considering how we managed to endure the isolation and worry, we must acknowledge a debt of gratitude to the public library system, with an assist from those engineers and innovators who came up with Amazon’s Kindle reader. We found little of the broadcast programming or streamed content on the television to be satisfying anymore. Books became a lifeline.
Never much of a serious reader growing up, I was momentarily thrown by a question from a panel member in an ornate university interview room.
“What was the last book you read?”
“Agatha Christie, I think?” Hoping that the panic didn’t sound in my voice. There was a pause, bordering upon eternity. Then he laughed.
“That was honest.” I heard, while furiously trying to recall the titles of the Conrad and other books that we had been assigned in high school.
Having survived the interrogation, I returned to the light reading that was a relaxation from text books. Later, it was a way to endure constant travel. A visit to an airport bookshop for a paperback in that pre-digital era was a necessary preparation to pass the time on a trip.
Was retirement the point at which my tastes changed? No, I managed to read pretty much everything David Baldacci has ever written, along with the usual suspects in that best-seller genre, after moving in with Burlington Northern. But it did mark the return to library services and abandonment of the annual Seattle used book sale. However, the day finally came when anything that appealed on the library online listing was on loan elsewhere and a decision had to be made.
I could not begin to chronicle my evolving taste in literature without resorting to Amazon’s database. Between us, my wife and I have read 650 digital books in the ten years since we acquired Kindles for Christmas. Some were published by Amazon but most found their way onto the list by the act of downloading to our Kindles from the library website.
I have always been inspired by libraries, from the joy as a pre-teen of discovering a new adventure story in a favorite series, or when taking our own children to the library on a Saturday morning and carrying home an armful of books for the week ahead. They enjoyed being read to long after they were able to read well on their own, I didn’t mind and truly enjoyed The Phantom Tollbooth. I could not convince the oldest to read a “long” book until I struck a deal. I would read the first Hardy Boys book as long as she read the next one. That was all it took. So, I had a respite until the youngest took a shine to a well-written series based upon Welsh mythology and its multitude of tongue-twisting character names. I mangled most of them, but he wasn’t the wiser. The children regularly beat the library reading challenges, a strength that served them well through school and college and on to successful careers.
I recently made a great discovery; the ability to recommend to the library system a newly reviewed but, as yet, unreleased book for a future purchase. Doing so puts you at the head of the list to borrow the book when it becomes available. I have scored several times on the actual day of release. A very satisfying feeling.
In looking over our Amazon history listing for just the last eighteen months, I have read several books about political figures in the administration and Congress, in a quest to understand what I found so distressing. And, additional thrillers, police procedurals and courtroom dramas.
More to the point are the illuminating biographies; Churchill, Bourdain, Trevor Noah, Elton John and the four founding gals of NPR were a few. Wonderful novels that include Beartown, The Goldfinch, Nothing to See Here and the not so wonderful Crazy Rich Asians. Plus, Jon Meacham’s The Soul of America, the memoir Educated and sobering books on the environment and evolution.
American Dirt is a harrowing tale of the courage and perseverence of migrants from Central America and Nomadland is a depressing chronicle of impoverished seniors and their quest to survive by travelling to manual part-time jobs and living in their vehicles.
In comparison to which, I can put up with the train horns.
Left To Write 