A Good, Clean Read

“Maybe you can at least get the gist of it,” my ever-optimistic boy said in an attempt to be consoling.

This morning, this soggy pile was a hard cover edition of a book I believe to be called “Crush It,” by Gary? Ted? Ver---------mer----something. It was next to impossible to tell when I approached my washing machine to investigate why it wasn’t running and I discovered that I never closed the lid, thereby keeping all the towels on hold in the drum filled with water of a shockingly blue-black hue. And a lot of strange fibers that didn’t resemble the texture of any linens I’m aware of owning.

My mind instantly did a flash-back segment to an hour earlier when I pulled the book from a laundry basket where someone—may have been me—had apparently stashed it days earlier in a hasty clean up effort. This would not be the first time mayhem resulted from this highly unrecommended house keeping method. After pulling the book from the basket where it had been whiling time safely intermingling with clean stray socks and “B” grade underwear, I set it on the dryer where it evidently got caught up in the loading process of the aforementioned linens. Miraculously, the Bible with which the damaged text had been paired remained on the dryer unscathed. I always heard that God protects His word. Meanwhile, the Lesser Text was marinating with the towels, book, and sundries for over an hour, with the cloth products faring much better than the paper.

I carried the dripping pulp to my front porch where I broke it down into segments in hopes they would dry. For the next several hours, the carnage got Top Billing in my personal headlines, as I’d ironically been planning to spend part of my day reading the book, and was suffering from dampened hopes.

Around nightfall, I gathered the saturated segments and a blow dryer. I made significant progress in the drying of a small, apparently mid-book section in the 2 minutes I worked on it before plunging the back of the house into darkness when I blew a circuit.

The waterlogged literature remained on the metaphorical back burner until bedtime. “I read some great things about it today online,” my husband offered.

“Don’t whet my appetite!” I pleaded. “I’m not spending another $20.00 on a second copy. I’ll just work more with the blow dryer tomorrow. I hope to get it to the point where I can punch holes in the pages and put them in a binder.”

“Don’t be silly,” my husband said. “You’ll spend more on electricity than I did today with the super saver rate I used when I ordered you a new copy online. It took some detective work to find it, though,” my husband said, detailing the trail he followed beginning with the website of the specialty shop in which we found it. “It sounds great.”

“Wow,” I said, thanking my husband for his efforts. “Still, that was a lot of work. Let’s hope the book is worth it. For all we know, he could be all wet.”