Here in NoVa, one of the signs of summer is the proliferation of yard sales and garage sales as people prepare for summer moves and do their general spring and summer de-junking. Telephone poles are covered with signs advertising the desire of people to divest themselves of things that were once important ... as described in this on-target poem ...
Yard Sale
by George Bilgere
Someone is selling the Encyclopedia Britannica
in all its volumes,
which take up a whole card table.
It looks brand new, even though it must be sixty years old.
That's because it was only used a couple of times,
when the kids passed through fifth grade
and had to do reports on the Zambezi River
and Warren Harding.
Der Fuhrer was defunct.
The boys came home,
and everybody got the Encyclopedia Britannica,
which sat on the bookshelf
as they watched Gunsmoke
through a haze of Winstons.
Eventually
these people grew old
and were sent to a home
by the same children who once wrote
reports on Warren Harding.
And now the complete and unabridged
Encyclopedia Britannica,
bulging with important knowledge,
is sitting on a card table in a light rain.
I remember my parents buying the World Book encyclopedia set, and then later the Encyclopedia Britannica ... which had an article about John F. Kennedy that still referred to him as a senator from Massachusetts. It's been a while.
Have a good day, and enjoy the yard sales of summer.
More thoughts tomorrow.
Bilbo
I remember them too - It's been a long time since I used the EB or the WB.
ReplyDeleteDiscarded books can be so sad.
ReplyDeleteThe old volumes of those Encyclopedias can be so interesting!
ReplyDeleteI remember when the grocery stores would sell encyclopedias. A new volume every week until you had the whole set. And then two volumes of updates.
ReplyDeleteNice poem. We had a World Book set from the mid sixties. I was never bored because I could, and often did, pull out a volume randomly and read. I guess that's a major source of the random things I seem to know.
ReplyDelete