Just a Few of My 6,000 Books

Here I am, in my late 70s and surrounded on all sides by a huge book collection. If my apartment were hit by burglars, my fear is that I would be sued for them because they would get a hernia carrying away my books. In fact, I am in the position of trying to find a home for the books I do not plan to re-read or consult.

What I had been doing is donating books to either a local thrift shop or library, but as the IRS standard deduction keeps increasing, I no longer have to keep records of my donations. All I really want to do is find a home for my discards.

What I have been doing lately is using are the display boxes of the Little Free Library (“Take a Book; Share a Book”), of which there a a number of “free libraries” in my neighborhood. So when I take a walk or go shopping, I usually have three or four books in my bag to donate. How do I make a donation? I simply take the books from my bag and put them on the shelves of the Little Free Library.

How did I ever get in this predicament? Well, to tell the truth, to the extent that I am a fairly happy well-adjusted person, I owe it all to my upbringing (I was lucky with my parents) and to the fact that books were a major form of escape for me—from the age of eight onward.

I remember the time that my little neighbor Patsy Strohmeier got me a hardback of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. While I was reading the book, my cousin Emil came to visit and was angered to see me with my face in a book. He picked up the novel and slammed it hard on the floor, saying “THIS is what I think of your books!” By that time, I was already so hooked that my first reaction was that he was, in effect, saying “THIS is what I think of YOU!” I wasn’t offended because I knew that Emil was a good-hearted person who just didn’t like to read.

Simply put, I became a bookworm because I was a sickly child. In fact, between the ages of 10 and 21, I was walking around with a brain tumor in my pituitary gland that stunted my growth and, in pressing on my optic nerve, caused severe frontal headaches on most days. Even with a headache, I could still read—though I was useless when it came to baseball, football, basketball, and most childhood sporting activities.

Somehow, in the course of time after I had brain surgery in 1966, I became a fairly healthy person. Oh, to be sure, I am a diabetic, have asthma and chronic rhinitis, but I seem to survived surprisingly well. (Bad rice! Bad rice!)