A chill October wind rustled outside the small book store. Inside, Mr. Brown was dozing in a corner,
tired of browsing through his collection of volumes. And an interesting collection of volumes it
was. Some nearly-full shelves of science,
engineering and math books. A large
collection of reports of engineering projects long-ago completed and filed
away. Together with the reports were personal
notes detailing relationships between the team members of those projects. An extensive travelogue section held shelves
of materials describing locations around the world with pictures, some vivid, some
faded, of those locales. One whole section of the store was home to
photo albums of various family activities.
There had been a time, some years ago, when the shop was
busy. Friends, family and total
strangers would come, looking for information and the shopkeeper was happy to
oblige. But now, there was hardly ever a
customer. It wasn’t as if he needed a
customer base to get by, but the sad part was, all those resources were going
to waste. He would gladly give away a
volume to anyone who could appreciate its value. He had gone so far as to stand on the sidewalk
and volunteer to provide free material to passing strangers, to very little
interest. Granted, his stock was
somewhat dated. No MP3 tunes, no Kindle
books. But still, his offerings had
value. They were good solid information,
and in some cases they came at a significant cost at their time of
acquisition.
Lately he had been concerned that maybe his housekeeping had
been lagging and as a result, some of the books were deteriorating. Pages were missing or had faded due to
humidity or whatever, to the point it was difficult to locate just the section
that he sought. He would search for a
particular document and more often than not, abandon the search before locating
it. And he always seemed to feel a lot
more tired than he ought to be. Maybe a
short nap right now would be refreshing. Just catch a few winks.
* * * * * * * * * *
At the other end of town, at SunnyVale Rest Home, an
attendant pulled the sheet up over the old man’s head. “Well, Mr. Brown went peacefully. Just passed in his sleep.”
“I hear he was quite a man in his day: Successful engineer; traveled
all over. Since he came here a few years
ago - that is, until lately, he really liked to talk about his work and his
travels. Would give you more facts than
you could handle.” “Just think of all
the information in that brain of his. More
than in a whole book store. But it’s all
gone now.”
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