I have a Kindle.  Nifty little bag of Steven Hawkings it is, and yet a bit Captain Kirk all at the same time.  I always hoped for a tricorder someday to analyze my aches and pains in a brief moment.  However, having the world according to my brain with a month battery charge is almost as good.  The overall health of my living self is still being monitored in part, as I carry the New York Times best sellers 1 to 35 each week from room to room.

When Bradbury offered up his living book, I was in awe of the vision.  At the time I was good for Flanders’s Fields, The Road Not Taken and several Hawthorne chapters, which I know bent me over to the dark side of life.  After all, once your faith is gone what is there for a good man?  And certainly everything in life is a pearl of a great price.  Nevertheless, to take in an entire book, breathing, eating and sleeping, to become the brittle pages for all eternity (without dropping acid) is just incredible!  Now that me and a few million others have a Kindle, I am sure the concept will become more ancient and in time forgotten as we actually do carry the library with us, available from $.99 and up, unless you visit the dark side and find a torrent (which has nothing to do with a copious outpouring) and then you fly free in first class looking over your ISP for big brother.

All things being equal however, I still find comfort knowing in Flanders Fields the poppies blow -between the crosses, row on row, and they have been doing it since 1915.

The first book I downloaded was of course Bradbury.  Call me a creature of habit or one who prefers the worn socks to new, what mattered was it was there.  We could become together, two era’s with the same goal – keep it alive for the living and those yet to be born.  Life is the same.  There is nothing sadder than living a life you pass from, with only dust and a few dreams scattered in your wake.  There is a time and place in this world for a bookmark, but there are no words for those who become one.

When my life ends, I know there will be far more between the row and row and I smile.  I may not have been a full color illustration or even a complete chapter, but I was words to the pages of my life.  The words varied along those roads in my life from innocent exploration to sensual adventure and even a little Wall Street crime and punishment.  The point of my pen is, I will leave a mark.  I was here.

My children avoid my marks now, my grandchildren have yet to experience them all and who knows what still lies ahead.  Regardless, I have committed my life to memory, chapter and verse and placed it in pictures and writings, tchotckes, scraps of paper and more than a few odd toys and I visit them often.  Those who clean up the ashes of my existence will see first hand, that I lived!  I hope they laugh and cry and maybe find some of the meanings I treasured – before putting it all on EBay, as they wonder why I never was on Hoarders.

Someday all bindings fail, the batteries no longer charge and all that is left is what is written, either in ink or breath.  I know behind me waits a library of life to pass on and pass over but never to just pass by.

After all, I am not now nor was I ever just a bookmark.