on losing friends

I wouldn't consider myself much of a collector. Very few things do I find valuable enough to put time and effort into collecting.

When I was younger, my grandma started a collection of Precious Moments for my sister and me. These suckers are worth a ton, and if you put a gun to my head and told me to find my collection, you might as well just pull the trigger. I don't know what I did with them. My fear is that in my haste to pack up my childhood home before moving to Charleston, I chucked 'em. Every single last one. And that makes my heart hurt. Not because I want to continue my Precious Moments collection, but because they meant something at one point, and maybe I would have a daughter one day who would really dig them.

One thing I can say with confidence that I collect are books. Call me old school, but I will never own a Kindle. I find it difficult to read things for long periods of time on a screen ... online articles, books, etc. I even downloaded an app for my iPod that was a book reader and I had access to thousands of classic books. About a week after downloading it, I erased it because I just wasn't use it.

It would be utterly depressing if I were to wager a guess as to the amount of money I have put into my bibliophile habit. People who don't understand often roll their eyes and ask me why I have to buy a book; why can't I just get them from the library?

I'm not entirely sure, but I think it has something to do with the smell of a new book, the heft of it in my hands, the actual turning of the pages, and the trip to the brick and mortar store to buy said book. With each book that I read I offer a bit of myself to it, as it offers itself to me. It's a give and take relationship.

I also envision myself, one day, having a home with built in bookshelves and I will need something to fill those suckers.

But then there are times when I'm strapped for cash, and I look around at my ever growing collection of books and load up a bag and take them over to Half Priced Books to sell them; to say goodbye to old friends.

Now, I have a love-hate relationship with HPB: I love them for their cheap books and I hate them because they rip you off when you sell them back.

It's like in college, when you have your student loan check fresh in hand at the start of a semester and you buy your $300 text book, then at the end of the semester when you're broke as a joke, you sell said book back for a fourth of the price. But because you are poor, you count it as a victory because you'll be able to pay for gas to get back to your hometown for the holidays. I'm just sayin..

So yesterday I took over a reusable grocery bag (look at me!) full of books I either have never read and probably never will, or books I will never read again. Among these? Time Traveler's Wife, Atonement, The Hour I First Believed, Grapes of Wrath, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, The Lord of the Rings Trilogy, and Frankenstein (I had 2 copies and sold one and kept one). There were a ton of others, but think they were so bad I don't remember them.

And how much did you get for these?, you ask? $30. Yep, thirty bucks. Thirty bucks for like $200 worth of books. But, like a poor college student, I was giddy with excitement and rushed off to buy my weekly groceries.

I feel bad for the death of these friends, and friends they are. Maybe not Atonement. It wasn't a very good friend. But it makes me sad, nonetheless.