SOME OF MY BEST FRIENDS ARE BOOKS

   ."I cannot live without books."  Thomas Jefferson
  
  ."When I get a little money, I buy books; if any is left, I buy food and clothes."  Erasmus

  ."A room without books is like a body without a soul."   Cicero

  ."There is no end to the writing of  books . . ." Ecclesiastes


  ."Where is human nature so weak as in a bookstore?"
        Henry Ward Beecher

    A bookstore of 'used books'. . . warehouse, actually... has opened in our town. And, the prices !!! Today, I bought two grocery bags for $5 each.  I told the owner that having a bookstore like his in the town where I live is like opening a liquor store next door to an alcoholic.  Beecher's quote pretty well describes me. I tell my wife that she is fortunate: Some men go to bars; I go to bookstores.
      As the above indicates, it reminded me of a flurry of  'book quotes'.  I have a wall plaque in my home office: "Books to the ceiling; Books to the Sky.  My piles of books are a mile high.
   How I love them.  How I need them.
I'll have a long beard by the time I read them."  And, yet I keep returning for MORE.  Today I eased my 'addiction guilt' by remembering  that most of these will be given to Interns in our office.  
    In College Freshman Composition class, we were required to read Francis Bacon's essay on Books: "Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested. . ."  Over the years, I have encountered books in each of those categories.  Some were important, provocative, memorable, helpful enough that one reading did not suffice. Every Christmas holiday, I reread Parker Palmer's, Let Your Life Speak: Finding the Voice of True Vocation and each year, there is a new "take away". Over fifty years ago, I began the practice of keeping a log of author, title and date of each book I read.  I don't think that I am particularly OC; but those lists are 'instructors' about varying interests and events stirring in periods of my life.
   Not surprisingly, all my professional life has been spent in occupations that valued books highly. . .History Professor, Parish Minister, and now Psychotherapist.  Even my brief foray into entrepreneurship was as a college textbook broker.  My two younger brothers share this affection for books. So, might the origins be found in our early home environment? I think  so.
Largely because of the Great Depression of the 1930's and limited childhood opportunities, neither of our parents were high school graduates (though both possessed that treasured commodity, 'Wisdom').  But there were always books in our home.  Mom belonged to the venerable Book of the Month Club during World War II and I would regularly roam the bookshelves.  The Beards' Basic History of the United States;  Bill Mauldin's book of war stories and cartoons, Up Front; Bronte's Wuthering Heights . . .these and others supplemented the usual childhood fare of Tom Sawyer, and my Zane Grey trilogy of baseball books, etc. Today,  I have not yet moved into the LARGE PRINT section of the bookstore. And, while I have one of those electronic readers, I am still biased towards the 'feel of the book in my hand' school of reading.
     There is no such creature as the "Self-Made" person.  "Success", however defined, is the confluence of many factors such as native abilities, being born in the 'right' place and time, kinspersons, dumb luck, and on it goes.  A helpful book for my understanding this has been Malcolm Gladwell's, The Outliers. My brothers and I are no more intelligent, God-blessed, or special than others.  It was just 'in the air' and 'in the water' of our lives because as we heard so often, "We want you to have opportunities that we didnot have." It is the gratitude for that influence that helps me understand and resonate with Anna Quindlen's title, How Reading Changed My Life.
    Satchel