What an E-Reader Can't Download

My wife recently gave me an electronic reader, and I look forward to using it to sample the latest novels, nonfiction and poetry. At the click of a button, as if rubbing a genie from a bottle, I'll be able to summon thousands of books to the screen on my lap.

The books on our living room shelf, on the other hand, were acquired through hours of browsing in bookstores. Lined up at attention from floor to ceiling, they stand as touchstones of my personal geography—bright reminders of places I've been, things I've seen, and people I've met.

While sipping coffee this morning, for example, I glanced at the spine of Lance Morrow's "Fishing in the Tiber" and thought instantly of Cleveland, even though the city doesn't figure at all in Morrow's lively collection of magazine essays. I'd gone to Ohio in December of 1991 to see my friend Stuart and his wife Anula, and they drove me into Cleveland for dinner at an Italian restaurant. Before eating, we braved a bitter gust from Lake Erie to visit a nearby bookstore, where Morrow's book landed in my hand.

Tomatoes among summer's best wonders

My doctor has told me to eat more fruits and vegetables, a prescription that’s more pleasure than penance here in summer, the banner season for homegrown produce.

I lunched on tomatoes and cottage cheese the other day, which doesn’t sound very decadent, except that the tomatoes were locally grown, which made a meal fit for a king.

My wife has a friend who eats tomatoes like apples, which recognizes tomatoes for what they really are - a fruit that’s mistakenly been cast as a vegetable.

Christie looks out her summer window

“What no wife of a writer can ever understand is that he’s working when he’s staring out the window.”

That classic observation from the late author and journalist Burton Rascoe ranks among my favorites, although my wife is quite a window-watcher herself and doesn’t really begrudge me my own daydreaming.

Rascoe’s point is that we’re often at our most creative when our mind is lying fallow, emptying itself of clutter so that it can be refilled with something better. This basic principle of rest applies to other forms of work besides writing, of course, and it’s a particularly useful idea to keep in mind during the summer, a season supposedly given over to slowing down and recharging one’s batteries.

Frog chorus helps lift low spirits

The late E.B. White, who is one of my favorite writers, surveyed the scene from his New England farm back in 1975 and found that much of the world was not to his liking.

The list of issues confronting him from the morning headlines seemed daunting:

“Oil. Unemployment. Nuclear power plants . . . Windmills . . . The price of gas at the pump. The price of doughnuts in the store. The power of the Federal Government. The long shadow of the state . . . Breaking and entering . . . Drug abuse . . . Arab sheiks.”

The current events of White’s day, of course, are eerily similar to those of our own, and they can seem even more depressing a generation later, giving as they do so much evidence of how little progress we’ve made in improving the human condition.

Outgrown books mark times past

Like most mothers, my wife has gotten a little wistful over the years when she comes across tiny shirts, shorts or shoes that our children have long grown too big to wear. Seeing these earlier versions of our daughter and son reminds us of the small people they used to be.

I got a similar feeling last week when our son, who’s now 10, cleared his shelf of books he’s outgrown. Stacked near the door, waiting for donation to charity, was the “Geronimo Stilton” series - a line of stories in which the title character, a globe-trotting mouse, uses an intriguing mix of words and pictures to introduce kids to chapter books. Our teenage daughter had enjoyed the series before handing it down to her younger brother. In previous purges of the household library, once-treasured staples from Dr Seuss and Shel Silverstein had also sung their swan songs.