Dominoes falling...

Like dominoes they are falling. Since January of 2008, at least 120 newspapers have shut down their presses. One by one, these great giants of printing have given up on what was once the "fourth estate" (although I never really knew what were estates 1-3). I mourn the loss of ink stained fingers and piles of recyclable waste being replaced by websites and text messaged news.

I read the paper with a pair of scissors and books with a pen in my hand. I have all my books still. The ones from my college days sit right next to the ones I bought last week. Flipping through the pages there are notes and quotes and sermon ideas and even comments back to the author although they never will see them. I even found my copy of Orwell's 1984 with all my margin notes when my daughter was reading it for her High School lit. class. Oh, what memories those notes rekindled. Books are meant to be ingested over time, not merely deleted when we are done.

I want kids to have books that they own. I want books to be familiar and bring warmth to our hearts when we see the old dog eared pages and the marks we made when we read them the first time. The smell of books should permeate our homes, not just the smell of electronic wires and the dull buzz of a computer monitor. When I walk into a home, I look immediately at the shelves to see what's there. Only the most precious things are on the shelves. What's on your shelves?

I recently visited a relative in their home. It is a very familiar home and I grew up there, spending lots of time playing there as a child. It was always a warm home and this time was no exception. As I sat in the living room, which many would think was way too cluttered and distracting, I could not help notice that there were books everywhere. Its what I remembered as a child. There were always books and magazines and they were piled and stacked everywhere. I always felt comfortable there.

During my last visit to Barnes and Noble, the shelves seem emptier. I wandered about looking for something to read. I always leave with a selection of new titles for my library. This time I left empty handed. Is it because I could not find valuable literature or was the emptiness of the shelves telling me something that brought sadness to my heart?

Have we become a society of sound bites and bulleted news stories which we read at red lights on our PDA's? Soon our children will be more adept at creating power point presentations than research papers. So much we owe to the ability to read and write and retell a story. Are we marginalizing our children's ability to do that in our time as we watch the dominoes fall?

I don't want an electric reader!