Wednesday, June 15, 2022
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Book people, booked up, square books, city light, millions and millions and millions of books
Driving to Lincoln, I wore my bright forest green t-shirt from Rowan Oak, William Faulkner’s home in Oxford, Mississippi. Two book guys named John and James, in the business for 35 years, came to Mom’s house for the morning and bought several hundred dollars worth of books and papers. Mary Kay had put them out on display, so to speak, and she did a wonderful job.
We talked awhile. Both of them had been to Rowan Oak in the last eighteen months. We talked about Larry McMurtry, writer and book lover. John always hoped McMurtry, who sometimes dropped in on random bookstores around the country, might drop on he and his wife’s store in Virden, Illinois, but he never did. John himself is following in McMurtry’s footsteps. He has two (or was it three?) buildings full of books now. McMurtry ended up with four, which held 450,000 books.
After a couple of hours, John and James thought they were finished, but while I was putting some of the books back into boxes, I found a couple more, one about the founder of our local Funk’s Seed, and a book by Langston Hughes, who lived in Lincoln for a few years. They took those too.
I know the book bug intimately. And so did Mom. Twenty-five years ago we showed her a website called half.com, and she just went to town, selling books every day, multiple times a day, and shipping them out, a simple cottage industry which she loved. Finding the books, of course, was much more than half the fun. She visited every library book sale, every mission mart, every goodwill store, over and over, and filled her basket every time. She read a few, read more to her great grandchildren, but mostly catalogued them in a variety of ways so she could find them again, once she gathered up several thousand of them, and posted them on half.com.
The house kind of filled up. Dad wasn’t always patient about this. After using every dresser in every room and the beautiful library she had built when designing the house, she began stacking the books in corners. For awhile, she unplugged an old upright freezer and filled every shelf with books. I think she reserved the freezer for memoirs and biographies. Her favorite books, though, were stories about spies, especially the really British, upright, nasty spies, who fooled everyone.
She tried reading Kindle books, and together we picked out hundreds for her, but even though she could increase the size of the font as her eyes weakened, she much preferred hardbound and paperback books. She grew up with them. She loved the feel of the pages, the paper, the bindings. And when she read poetry, which she did frequently and also recited some of those poems for her kids and grandkids, nothing but the oldest book in the oldest binding she could find, would do.
As Elijah and Elisha walked on and talked, a flaming chariot and flaming horses came between them, and Elijah went up to heaven in a whirlwind. When Elisha saw it happen he cried out, “My father! My Father! Israel’s chariots and drivers!” And then Elisha could no longer see Elijah, and he gripped his own garment and tore it in two.
Mom learned to love books from her father Herman, who read Tales from Shakespeare to Mom and her younger sister Mary Lou, who became one of the first female Lutheran seminarians, and whose library was more important than anything else in her house. Grandpa Brummer passed on his book lover’s mindset to his children, and they passed it on to everyone around them.
Elisha picked up Elijah’s mantle, went back and stood at the bank of the Jordan. Wielding the mantle that had fallen from Elijah, Elisha struck the water in his turn and said, “Where is the Lord, the God of Elijah?” When Elisha struck the water it divided, just as it had for Elijah, and he crossed over.
Dad – the accountant, scientist and farmer – read book after book after he was confined to their house by illness. Mary Kay is in a book club at her local library. This month they are reading The Grapes of Wrath. She loved taking Mom around to libraries and bookstores after Mom could no longer drive. John has lately been reading books about fishing reels and Mickey Mantle. All of us get quickly hooked on Readers Digest magazines, sitting on the bathroom table, some of them from as long ago as 1929. And all of us have read the Bible for as long as we’ve been alive.
Let your hearts take comfort, all who hope in the Lord.
I not only read, but I’ve kept track of the books I’ve read, at least since 1989. My librarian buddy Glenda and I share our reading lists each month, and that is a pleasure virtually without parallel. These days books come at you from all corners – audio books and ebooks, hoopla books and libby books, overdrive books and picture books, kids’ books, large print books. Just by compiling these devotions, I’ve published nine books myself, using Amazon’s wonderful, simple, free self-publishing service.
How great is the goodness, O Lord, which you have in store for those who fear you. And which, toward those who take refuge in you, you show in the sight of the children of men.
On the way home I dropped off a couple boxes of very good books at our favorite thrift store, Salt and Light. The clerk with the wild white hair pointed out that books were a buck a bag today. I was about to leave, but of course I hesitated when he told me that.
Always a comic, he told me, “Well, you could come back tomorrow and buy back the books you brought in today.”
I didn’t wait, though. I took one of his bags, and quickly filled it up.
(2 Kings 2, Psalm 31, John 14, Matthew 6
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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