A Book Story

I was having a goodbye dinner tonight with a friend who've I've known for about as long as I've been in Calaveras County. She had a wonderful small used bookstore and I worked for her once a week. The store was in what was the ice house of the long-gone general store in Arnold, and the walls were brick. We heated it with a dragon of a wood stove in the winter, and spent time shoveling ourselves out the front door. Jenni told me that today someone brought in 14 bags of books, and as Jenni was going through them, she kept having a very eerie feeling. About three quarters of the way through, she realized that they were my books! A neighbor had done me the great favor of packing up books that I'm not moving to Burbank and taking them to the Humane Society Thrift Store that Jenni is now the manager of. Sadly, I can't take all the book, nor, really, do I need them all. I do love to look at a wall of books, though. Jenni has a very special connection to people, and I'm sure that is how she recognized me through my books. Of course there were a lot that I'd bought from the bookstore when I worked there, and that was surely a clue. 

So good-bye books, good-bye Jenni. Good-bye Debbie and Bill and Jenny and Nate who we ran into at the restaurant. Good-bye to Judy, my therapist, who I saw for the last time today. She saved my life two and a half years ago. A long good-bye to Murphys.