It's Called 'Frugality,' My Dear, or, Why I Should Neither Buy Books nor Blog After Drinking

Logic puzzles are getting harder and harder to find.

I remember the very moment I laid eyes on my first logic puzzles. Dad had driven Jamie and I to Houston for a school thing, where we'd go to the natural history museum and the renaissance faire and then afterwards, inexplicably, we would all go to the cinema to see The Beverly Hillbillies (which still sticks out sorely in my mind because it was a terrible movie and I could never quite figure out how it fit into the whole trip-thing). After that it was dark and I was probably wound up, having had so much excitement packed into my day followed by two hours sitting still in the dark. I'm sure I was whining.

"Dad. I'm BORED."

Dad's answer to boredom has always been one of two things: airshows or bookstores and, there being neither in the near vicinity, we ended up in the magazine aisle of the local grocery. (What people will do, in a pinch.) And there they were: logic puzzles. A whole magazine full of them. I remember having that tingling sensation as I flipped through the pages, knowing at that moment that my Solitaire-playing days were over. (Yes, I DO care to find out whether John's last name is Jones or Bobton or Trent, and whether he married Sally or Alicia or Jane, and whether they went to the Galapagos or the Bahamas or to boring old Yosemite on their honeymoon. This is IMPORTANT INFORMATION.)

Tough little buggers they were, too. The logic puzzlers are a dying breed, I'm pretty sure, and when you're little and you're puzzling and kind of stuck, there's really no one that can help you. ("Mom? Can you read this?" "...No.") Only once has someone ever approached me while I was puzzling away and said, "YOU LOVE LOGIC PUZZLES?!" and that person was really, really excited, and she told me how she thought she was the only one in the world who did them, but I was like, well, obviously someone is coming up with the things, and she was all, no, no, really, IT'S JUST ME. AND NOW YOU.

Suddenly I know how she feels.

One would think, of all places in Portland, Powell's would have logic puzzles. Would you like to see how many shelves make up their Sudoku section? Or perhaps their crossword section? Would you now? Because I can show you. I can also show you their Mensa section, and their stupid "Fill-It-In" section, and their anything-that-anyone-else-has-come-up-with section. I had to plead with the info guy to search for "logic puzzles" because he kept sending me to the math section and then back to the puzzle section and I had to keep telling him that I wasn't FINDING IT please just search for them and tell me where they are because every time you send me out I keep picking up a new book and I can't afford all of this PLEASE - thank you. Finally he did and the one book we came up with seemed to be an assortment of general brain-benders so I sighed and then bought my books and left.

Which! is actually the point of this post. I need to stop buying books, because A) I do not have time to read them so they just sit and look rather pretty, which sounds pretentious but actually feels really comforting and good and B) I should probably save my money, considering that I haven't gone to work in well over a month now. But last night I was cleaning up after Lyra left and I lined up all of her books on the shelf under the tv and they really didn't take up much space, so at Powell's today I very carefully selected a few new additions to her library.

It's time-consuming, picking out Lyra-books: I know, or think I know, what sort of stories she would like and the kinds of illustrations she's attracted to, but then I have to read the entire story all the way through because I've been tricked by pretty pictures before. Also, and barely relatedly, there's a book called "Henry Works," about a bear who is supposed to be Henry Thoreau, and while the illustrations are fantastic the story is quite boring, although the end is funny in a three-year-olds-will-never-get-this kind of way. I did not buy it. Instead, I ended up choosing a delightful rendition of "The Emperor's New Clothes" and this fabulous book of poems called "Behold the Bold Umbrellaphant." How could she not love these? I like to think that I'm shaping the future memories of her childhood, that she'll look back in twenty years and ask me just which book it was, the one with the flying frog toasters? And I'll say, "Ah, I remember the very day I picked that out of you..." and then I'll spend a whole weekend digging through box after box in search of it just so I can run my fingers over its wrinkled pages and cry. Then, when she wants it, maybe she's thinking about having her own kids or she just wants to revisit those pictures and the way she felt back then, I'll make her promise to take care of it and hopefully she'll roll her eyes and say something like, "MOM. You bought that book for ME, remember?" And I'll probably offer to buy her a new copy, one without wrinkles, and maybe we'll even fight about it a little bit, a good kind of fight, the kind you can only have when you both really love each other as well as something else.

See? Books are special.

Some of you are probably wondering how I can get so off-topic so quickly, and I really have nothing to say to that.