Of Kindles, Grindles, Spindles, and Swindles

[Author's note: For some reason, Blogger posted the first two words of the title before I had written anything else. There is nothing missing in that last "post."]

Claire Nathan has been thinking about that woman at the doctor's office showing Randall her Kindle. That got her to thinking about electronic books. A Kindle would save a lot of dusting.

She asked about it at H2O aerobics at the "Q," which is the "Y" for people farther back in the alphabet of age groups. Ivy Wheeler was the only one there with a Kindle. She likes it. But Ivy is the editor of "Saturday Morning Going Postal," the weekend edition of the Periwinkle County newspaper, the "Our World Herald," known to one and all as the "Old Wierd Harold," so Claire isn't sure how far to trust her. Editors are a strange bunch.

She talked to Jake and Jenny Newland about it, too. Jenny had invited her over because she had heard from insurance super-agent, Sam McNorris, that Claire and Randall had a murder-suicide pact as end of life planning. Jenny was interested in the first part of the pact.

Talk of end of life planning caused Jake to bring up his idea that he and Jenny should move to Capitol City, where their daughter is a psychiatric nurse at St. Olga's Hospital. "This big old house and all the big old lawn mowing and the big old snow shoveling and the big old persimmon plot just take too much effort," he said. "We need to be in a condo or assisted living or something." Jenny, however, reminded him that there is no facility in Cap City that will take them and Franklin and Elanor, their minature pot-bellied pigs, too, and she is much more willing to live without Jake than she is to do without the company of the pigs. At least that what she says when she knows Jake and Eleanor are listening. [Franklin has heard so often how much smarter pigs are than dogs that he feels it's not necessary to listen to anybody anymore, since he's smarter than they are.]

"I understand," said Claire. "The more I think about it, the less willing I am to give up the company of my books. I love to see them on the shelves, remember when I read them and what I felt then. So there's a little dust? It just means somebody is either coming or going. You know, 'From dust we come and to dust we shall return.' Sure, when we move into a condo or assisted living, there won't be much room, but I'd rather have a Kindle for my clothes than for my books."

So her husband is out by the Lapis Azuli River, in the basement of Jed Bozo's parents, where Jed lives, and where Randall has been the test subject for Jed's invention, the Grindle, the virtual love machine. Since Randall is a well-known hermudgeon, a combination of hermit and curmudgeon, and it is well known that he tries to avoid people altogether, which causes people to call him up and ask him how his avoidance project is going, because in PC people try to be supportive of other folks' eccentricities, Jed is using him as the test subject for the Grindle, named after super-lawyer Tod Cohen's dog, because it is a virtual lover of many legs. If anybody is willing to eschew real people and get by on virtual love and companionship alone, it has to be retired pastor Randall Nathan.

Randall, though, is not sure he can get along without the real Clarie, even though she is old and wrinkled, even though he has a young and sultry virtual Claire on the Grindle, a Claire on whom he can turn the sound down whenever he wants, so he is talking Jed Bozos into abandoning the Grindle and creating an electronic virtual clothes closet, on which one can store an entire wardrobe through ionic osmosis and just reverse the ionization process when a garment is needed and bring it back out of the electronic tablet to wear. "You could call it the Spindle," he said.

Jed is getting more and more excited. "Yes! he says. "This could put Goodwill out of business, and I hate them, because they wouldn't give my Star Wars cards back when Mother gave them away while Swoozy Mays was dumping me at university. I had to buy them back. I'll call the new clothes Kindle not the Spindle, but the Swindle. Yes!"

Randall thought it best not to mention that his entire wardrobe has already been rejected by Goodwill.