“Once I Used You as a Doorstop, but Now I’m a-Missing You”

Nope, those are not really Country music lyrics (although yes, they would be good in a Conway Twitty ditty), they simply describe what I am thinking and feeling tonight as I sit by the Allthesuzmobile, otherwise known as my computer.

Those words you mistook for CMA award-winning lyrics describe how I have been feeling about life without all of my books lately.  If you are a loyal reader or friend of  All the Suz, you may recall that most of my stuff still lives in a very nice basement in the Garden State (another shout out to the most outstanding couple in NJ).  The three “beech effekt” bookcases also live there, but that’s beside the point.  The point is, lately things have come up and I have thought, “heck, Suz, you oughta look that up in “XYZ” book”, but then I remember that “XYZ” book is in a box in the aforementioned basement literally thousands of miles from here.  In other words, I would have to use at least 3 modes of transportation and spend the greater part of a day travelling to get the book in question.

I will give you an example.  Today I was at yoga (shocker! end the post there…the readership has fainted) and I could not for the life of me remember the name of a pose I had practiced hundreds of times.  “Hey, I will go look that up in the Yoga Mala when I get back home.”  But then the realization comes at me faster than the Tsunami tidal wave in my favorite “Tsunami Escape Route” picture…no can dos, Suz.

Again, to quote our main man Magnum, P.I., “I know what you’re thinking.”  Use the internet, nimrod! Well, first of all, I don’t appreciate being called a “Nimrod”–it’s dated, if not offensive.  And secondly, you may call me old-fashioned, but there’s just something refreshingly civilized and, well, human about looking something up in the pages of a physical book.

I think you are catching on to my dilemma…unless you were born after about 1985 when they stopped printing books.  If that’s the case, you do not know what I am talking about and, in addition to being reminded to charge your Kindle, you’ve just consulted the 8-ball App on your iPhone, asking: “Will I ever be as behind the times as Suz?”  My sources say “yes”, but that’s just a personal opinion.  Not to mention I have already been forced to leap into the future (and the future is now) by looking up a lot of my queries on the International Network.

Tonight, while I was trying to be all high-brow and highfalutin and use a Sanskrit phrase in an email, I realised I could not remember it off-hand and wanted to look it up in an actual, physical, space-occupying book.  By now you understand my dilemma (it’s a rinse and “‘Pete and Repeat went into a boat.  Pete fell out…who was left?’  ‘Repeat'”…kinda thing).  The book was miles away, and when I did try to look it up, I was met with the frustration of a slow internet connection (see All the Suz Blog Poll #2) and a small hole in my literary heart.

Mind you, I am not trying to bring a tear to your eye or elicit sympathy, but rather I want you to stop and think of your own books.  Maybe you’re the type of person who’ll “be damned if I sell that ORGO book back to Podunk University for a lousy $3 after I spent half a semester’s worth of work-study income on it!”  Maybe you are a person who highlighted Machiavelli’s The Prince within an inch of its life and cannot possibly fathom passing along your discoveries to a student who, after all, must discover his or her own gems within the text.  Whatever the case may be, our books mean something to us (at least those of us born before 1985).  They smell a certain way; their weight reminds us of the space they occupied in our backpacks; we invested in them with our time and effort.

And, at the end of the day and when all else fails (when we have no more forks to bend and squeeze beneath the frame), sometimes we do just need our books to prop open the door and let in some fresh air.  Maybe there’s nothing wrong with that.