Left Me Scratching My Head
Guy came into the library
said he’d like to donate these books
Said
sure they’re ten years old but still good
despite their contents being superseded
ten times over and
What
he said
when I grimaced
he said
What do you mean
you don’t think anyone
will be willing to pretend
it’s ten years ago and
the information
these books have to offer
is new
meaningful
in style
au courant?
When I shook my head no
he said
Well, if you don’t want them
then why would I?
he said
and stomped out.
2/28/19
3/5/19
Claudia McGill Writes Poetry, Did You Know That? 
I was thinking about this very thing just the other day because of my sons’ hefty school textbooks. All of that paper, that immense carbon footprint, and the contents probably go out of date pretty quickly. And the kicker is that my sons don’t even use the physical textbooks right now because they are also available online. I am big into buying second-hand books but I don’t think even I would not buy a book with irrelevant or outdated content – except as collage material.
Any more it is difficult to see buying a lot of categories of non-fiction books – unless the info in them is unlikely to be changing fast (I think of several library books I’ve gotten recently on whittling, which as you may have guess is not evolving as a craft very much…).
Some vintage books also have merit just as historical artifacts. I still own my Granddad’s school atlas that is full of outdated maps of countries that no longer exist and a whole lot of racism.
And now you have made me think of whittling which is something I used to do as a kid – back when small kids were allowed to be unsupervised with very sharp knives.
For Christmas I got a new whittling knife. In spring I will be working with it. Lookingforward to seeing what I do with it, since I have only vague ideas right now, but the stick women figures I made last year gave me the idea.
This made me laugh out loud! thank you.
Thank you. I so love to hear that! It is based on a composite of incidents I overheard in various sessions at the library (back when we could go inside). People do not make sense to me. I try to see it in a humorous way as much as I can, so that I will not lose my mind. Sometimes, you just gotta laugh and shake your head!