Book List on the Sidebar

I decided to add something new on the sidebar.

It's a list of books that I believe have something significant to say about our world, how we perceive it, and our place within it.  

While I am open to suggestions for other books to list I will only list non-fiction books that I have personally read and that I feel have no specific political, social, or religious ax to grind.  

While it's impossible to get away from any kind of agenda, if the author's agenda gets in the way of picking out the useful information, it won't be listed.

Fiction can speak strongly to many important issues, but since it relates the message through set up environments and characters, it often leaves us with an emotional response but no real blueprint about how to use it in the real word.

Somewhere there's a story

bear
Originally uploaded by havatar

A few weeks ago while cutting the lawn I found this bear laying in the street along the curb. A little white bear holding a red rose mounted on a wooden block with the following inscription burned in.

Me and you
You and me
That's the way
It'll always be

Somewhere there's a story attached to this bear.

Did some person think so little of the relationship they were in that they threw the little guy out the window?

Did someone get it to give to some special person only to have them laugh at it and toss it away?

Is there someone somewhere heart broken at the loss of a precious token of affection from some special person?

There are many variations of the above, and while I am curious, I'll likely never know the story behind the bear. Even so, I just couldn't toss it away. Maybe someone will come looking for it. So I placed it upright on the curb instead of the street thinking maybe someone would see it and reclaim the story or start a new one. And I went back to cutting the lawn.

A few days later my wife asked me about the bear out in our lawn. I gave the quick story. She told me it was no longer on the curb. I looked out, and sure enough it had moved across the parkway and was now sitting beside our sidewalk, and instead of facing the street in now faced the house. Someone had added another chapter to the bear's story. Another chapter that I'll probably never know.

A few days after that we had some rain. Later I found the wet bear laying in the grass. That just didn't seem right so I moved him up on to our mailbox post where you seem him in the picture. He gets lots of sun there so he dries out fairly quickly. He's still visible from the road. Sometimes when the mail gets delivered he falls off. his sense of balance is apparently lacking.

He sits out there, day and night, rain or shine. Sits there holding his rose. Sits there waiting for someone to come along and finish the story on a happier note.

I suspect that after a month or two of sitting out in the rain and sun that I'll have no choice but to dispose of the bear. But I can't helping hoping for better ending.