Random Saturday

Ah, Saturday!

And a 3-day weekend, to boot!  [Patriot's Day weekend.  It's a Maine and Massachusetts thing.]

Having our eldest, Nate, back in the house for a few days has been nice. We'll be celebrating his birthday (which was yesterday) on Monday, since he's been out "gigging" in the remoter parts of Maine this weekend.  [That way, too, we can decouple his birthday from 3 negatives: tax day, the sinking of the Titanic, and the death of Abraham Lincoln.  Sheesh!]

I'm really taking to this ereader thingie like a fish to water. I downloaded a couple of free Bible translations (ESV, HCSB) from B&N, and an old book called Bible Holiness. So it's pretty obvious, I like free stuff.

I'm sitting in the library right now. A quiet place full of printed books. But most of the people here are plugging away on computers.

It's National Poetry Month, so they've got a special display of poetry books, from which I selected Mary Oliver's Owl and Other Fantasies. Mary Oliver is one of my three favorite poets, for sure.

The downside of etexts on these ereaders: illustrations (maps, for example) are almost useless. Also, at least in the book I'm reading just now, you get a lot of typos. A lot. It gives you the sense that the makers are slipshod, careless, but I suppose it's all to be blamed on the software or something.

Still, the traditionalist's nostalgia for printed text on paper seems overdone to me. I run into this a lot among library people. But isn't it the words themselves, not the technology by which they're reproduced, which transport us? And that's why we love books, mainly. The words, conveying as they do all kinds of excitement, deep thinking, emotion, and the sense of dramatic motion . . . simply getting caught up in a story . . . these things transport us. Right?

Here's the start of a Mary Oliver poem to leave you with. The poem is called, "Herons in Winter in a Frozen Marsh."

All winter

two blue herons

hunkered in the frozen marsh,

like two columns of blue smoke.