Last night late. Was it the memory of turning pages? Or a tremor in my hands. My Kindle somehow became unhinged from my wireless and suddenly all the books were gone.
Sure I still had some real books. I love bookstores. Ever since Larry McMurtry signed the battered copy of All My Friends Are Going To Be Strangers I had just pulled out of the back pocket of my jeans and offered up to him like a prayer, I wanted to own a bookstore. I even worked in Chicago’s legendary (at least to me) Barbara’s Bookstore.
But then came Kindle. Any book. Any time, Right now.
Addicted? How about gobsmacked. Suckerpunched. In some distant cloud, there are a thousand or so books of mine just a few key strokes away. Books I can inhale. Every time I take a breath. And now they were gone! And all the 800 lines were closed. The amazon store down the street was a joke.
But there was a copy of The Sun. An old Sarah Vowell I’d always meant to read. A lot of New Yorkers.
It took hours on the phone to get my fix today. But somehow somebody captured that cloud. Now all 1,000 books are back in my pocket.
The craving is gone. I’m not an addict. Am I?
Only thing I can’t figure out is, what if I run into Larry McMurtry again? Or, for that matter, any other writer hero.
How do they autograph my kindle?