A VALENTINE OUTING WITH GRANDDAUGHTERS

Reading non-fiction is important at The Study. But so is the delight of delving into fiction.

Lately we have enjoyed several mystery writers, reading five books in a series dealing with a detective operating in California.

We stopped at #5 when an apparent error of logic/consistency appeared.

Email to author’s website went unanswered – and so much for that writer.

And so we searched for another author – and settled on one from an earlier era – Raymond Chandler.

The first volume of his Philip Marlowe series was ordered online along with a non-fiction work dealing with a new perspective on the forging of the Anglo-American Alliance of WW2.

And the price of the history text was ca. half of what it would have been in-store.

Well, three days later the little brown box arrived via UPS whilst I was clearing snow from the driveway.

Happy, happy day!

The mystery book was fine.

The jacket and binding of the history book looked fine.

But when we opened the book, we found that the pages were upside down relative to the spine and book covers.

The phone book located a store-version of the retailer.

Dear Wife and Granddaughters and I made our way there on the day before Valentine’s Day – and it was a grand happening indeed.

The store happily replaced the defective edition. We spent a delightful three hours browsing an immense center of culture – housing even 30,000 used books. We ‘dined’; networked with the staff; shopped; and enjoyed the ambience – and – on a whim, I asked the bookish gentleman in the dvd department if they had a copy of Charley Wilson’s War, knowing that it would probably cost an arm and a leg.

Well, the price was a whopping $9.99 minus 20% off.

Dear Wife and the girls all bought a book each; one dvd; and I had my dvd and the replaced history volume.

We returned to The Study for turkey burgers and the film the girls had bought.

So, out of imperfection sometimes comes perfection. Something like falling into a manure pile and coming up smelling like roses.

I did not make that up.