It Only Takes One Person

We had a wonderful Easter week-end with our daughter's family. They live near Kansas City, so we stayed over one more night and went into town to do a little shopping before heading home.

One of our stops was at Costco where we stocked up on a number of items. I'm mostly a library user, but Ken is a slower reader, so he generally buys the books he reads. Costco has a good sized book section, both hardbacks and paperbacks, all at a nicely reduced price. While I was cruising the aisles looking for the things on my list, Ken spent a fair amount of time looking for a book. He ended up with one of the newer David Baldacci books.

Since time was a factor, I didn't browse the book section. When I get near a lot of books, I'm lost for a long time, so I knew I'd better forgo that pleasure today. And believe me, it was not easy. All I did was take a quick glance across the entire section. Certain bookcovers called out to me, but I stayed strong and passed them by.

But ast we drove home to Manhattan across the Flint Hills, I started to think about all those books. There were so many books and so many authors. Walk into your local library, the nearest Barnes and Noble, or scan through the Amazon site. Thousands of books, and each one came into existance because one person had an idea. One person had a driving desire to write a story that turned into a novel or perhaps a nonfiction book. One person plotted and planned. One person sat before the computer, or in years past--a typewriter, or some even wrote in longhand, but they all spent hours and hours creating the book that you can read in far less time than it took them to write it.

The authors of all those books are people of various temperaments as well as different cultures, religions, races and political persuasions. Some are young, some are elderly. Some are likable, some are not. But whomever they might be, they have written a book which proved good enough to be published and have provided pleasure, information or enlightment for thousands of people.

I'm still feeling the pain of not being able to browse through the book section today, so maybe tomorrow I'll head to my local bookstore for the afternoon and see what's new.