I kept looking at the bookcase,

at my bookcase,

it was the last bookcase in the world.

It’s  not that I mind progress or change,

it is life itself to change, and to grow, and to accept.

They stopped making bookcases when they stopped

making paper books,  there was no longer any need for either,

it happened around the year 2025, it was like gay marriage

and the Confederate Flag, the world seemed to decide at one time

that one was okay, and the other wasn’t,

the world decided that paper books were wasteful

and inefficient in the new global economy, and you know what happens

to people and jobs and things when the economists decide they no longer

belong in the new global economy. They are gone, don’t let anyone

tell  you otherwise.

The economists and CEO’s decided that books were

wasteful, a conceit and pretension, we needed the trees used for the books

and the bookcases to save Mother Earth, who was bleeding to death, and the

spaces that bookcases took, space was getting precious, the resources of the world,

dwindling.

I don’t talk about it much, there are lots of people who have never seen a bookcase

or had one,

but bookcases

were  my life once,

before my tablets and smartphones

and e-readers. Before my Apple things, my Amazon Prime.

A book was not just to read but to hold and smell

and feel, a bookcase was my doorway to the world,

to ideas and thoughts and stories.

It was another world, another time and place.

I kept mine for as long as I could, they laughed at me,

asking if it was  museum art, if I was a collector of useless things,

they thought me a stuffy old fool.

A bookcase had a smell that brought up history and time,

I loved the different colors, bindings, titles, the different type and textures. It looked the art

of the earth to me.

I turned to my bookcase like a lover, it never once failed me, it brought me  out of

myself, into the world, it saved my mind so many times.

I have a lot of books on my phone now, they go everywhere with me,

they are the new bookcases, and isn’t that something.

I get sad these days when I look at my bookcase, it is a reflection of me,

I think, getting older and useless and left behind by new things,

new ways of understanding things.

The early morning sun and

the late afternoon sun, loved a bookcase, the bookcase loved the light back.

The slanting light always

found a bookcase, they seemed like sacraments and peaceful things,

the books taught me patience and acceptance, they always seemed to be standing and ready,

waiting

out time together, they never imagined a day when they would come

for the last bookcase,

and then there would be no need of more.