Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Kindle

To whom it may concern:

This is in response to your recently advertised 30-day trial for Kindles.

I am a teacher and have used Kindles in class in conjunction with book studies. They have not been at all conducive to the classroom. Students cannot take them home (since purchased at such high cost), so I cannot assign reading at home and must therefore rely on class time for students to complete all reading. It has tripled the normal time it would take my classes to read a book.

Inconvenience aside (ironic, considering the device's touted convenience), I also will not purchase or promote Kindle, or any other reading/ book application, regardless of platform because the popularity of such technology could very well lead to the elimination of physical books in the near future, which a corporation's demand for limitless growth must necessitate.

Physical books possess the innate capacity to survive decades without a reliable power source. If the electricity goes out, physical books retain all usefulness. Kindles (and the like), on the other hand, would quickly consign themselves to no more than expensive plastic paperweights in such an event.

What will a paperless world do in the event of an EMP attack or solar storm sufficient to collapse "The Grid"? H.G. Wells imagines such a scenario in The Time Machine, in which mankind's malignant addiction to technology leads to its utter collapse (I would offer to let you borrow my copy of the book, but sharing has become nearly as outdated as paper-based text. So, for the sake of modernity and progress, I'll #KeepItForMyself).

I recognize that I represent what is likely an overwhelming minority. The masses, no doubt, perpetually swing from swoon to climax at the release of each successive, highly addictive gadget, contraption, iThis, iThat, and Smartwhatever. Their acutely addictive nature is, no doubt, the reason for such ostensibly benevolent invitations to Free 30-Day Kindle Trials.

The name Kindle itself stands in a blaze of irony. And I wonder if it isn't intentional. What, precisely, do they hope to kindle? A love for reading or, perhaps, the pyres of book burning? If your people intend the former, is it the device that excites interest, or the content of the literature? Has the populace become so dull as to mistake packaging for substance? No doubt your quarterly earnings statement would suffice to answer.

Or is the Kindle popularity due to the increasingly warped and superficial nature of human sexuality in our society? I suppose books are too fat to be loved and cherished, when skinnier, sleeker, sexier (which is to say, more technological) substitutes can be purchased at irresistibly attractive rates.

Yes, I am likely a minority. Give me slow food cooked at home over McAnything, hand-written letters rather than text messages, time with a person not FaceTime.

And yes, give me a library holding a finite number of physical volumes over an electrified contraption loaded with hypermegaterrabytes of compressed files. 

Birds in and around Allensville, Kentucky

My grandmother, Grandma Jean we call her, is a lover of creatures. She feeds just about anything with fur or feathers. Above all, she loves birds and maintains a small avian oasis in her backyard. When I would visit as a child, I would shoot straight for her kitchen window, looking for gold finches, cardinals, hummingbirds. Some seasons a robin would nest in the window sill beside her sink. My brothers and I would watch the soft blue eggs, waiting for the little ones to break free.

At home with my parents, who lived on a wooded dead end, I'd often spot larger species -- hawks, osprey, vultures, and the occasional pileated woodpecker, drilling dead trees with its unmistakable Morse code.

The early fascination has grown up with me. Now that I live south-western Kentucky, among fields the row croppers rotate from wheat to soybeans to corn, I see birds I had only known from field guides -- meadowlarks, quail, common night hawks, Mississippi kites, eastern bluebirds, indigo buntings. 

The last one I mentioned -- the indigo bunting -- is one that has just recently begun visiting our place. On Monday morning, two indigos darted in front of me as I drove out the half mile gravel driveway between my house and the road.

A Gathering

I woke this morning thinking naught but a confirming text message stood between me and a snow day -- or an ice day, to be more specific. Instead, I scraped thick ice off my borrowed 18 passenger van (usually used to transport seasonal farm hands) before motoring the 4.9 miles between the Adams homestead and my school.

This iciness is a recent change, as last week's warmth and sun followed by wind and torrential rain hinted at April. Between the downpours lay Saturday afternoon and early evening, and my industrious wife took to the yard as I prepared Sunday's sermon. 

After our landlady sent a group of men in late autumn to take out several of trees in the front yard -- trees which served as a sort of privacy fence at the house end of our half-mile gravel drive --  many of their branches still littered the front yard. 

Taking a half broken metal rake, she combed the yard clean of more than one season's debris into several heaps. By the time I finished my studying and outlining, she ready to begin hauling her work about 75 yards away to the edge of the field where a gaping sinkhole frustrates the yield of row-croppers.

She gathered. I carried. 

Soon, work complete, we retired to the house. 

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