xlviii

“Dear Sir or Madam will you read my book, it took me years to write won’t you take a look?”

-Sir Paul of The Beatles

            My room back home is still full of ticket stubs and unopened action figures, effectively a roped-off museum display of the past eighteen years of my life, Hiroshima intact and ready for my return. Everything is in its place still, every photo, every Shawn-Bradley-signed basketball, every dusty rosary that I haven’t used for years. Everything is there.

            Except for my books.

            I lugged four cardboard boxes up three flights of stairs two weeks ago, each duct-taped lid overfilling with dog-eared hard-covers and heavily used paperbacks, numbering the sole survivors of the evac procedures from move-out.

            There are over one-hundred of them, including four comic books, five books by Jesus R. R. Tolkien, and six F. Scott volumes. Fitting perfectly in my standard four shelves, they are sitting and waiting for me to remember them, and the sweat that stained the brown of their cardboard boxes two weeks ago.

            They are sitting and waiting for me to read them. And I will. Once I find the time.