This is a new flower for me. I haven’t seen one on my normal walk, but this was one block over so I could stop at the Post Office and then continue uphill. One of my homeless friends told me there was a book sale at the Achievement House Store. Achievement House is an organization that helps people with special needs. I don’t go there very often because it’s mostly a junk store, what I call a junk store anyway, with books and clothes and lots of junk. I try very hard to avoid accumulating junk. But books…

The sale was 4 for $1.00. My friend had already laid some things in a special pile for me to find. One of them was a treasure. It was an Astronomy textbook from 1964, the year I took Astronomy with very limited comprehension as a Freshman in college. It has none of the color or colorized Hubble photographs that are so distracting. It has line drawings, black and white photographs and text. What I could barely understand 54 years ago, now seems obvious. I suppose I’ve gone on learning what baffled me, or else I just inadvertently absorbed it. No one in my family knew anything about what I studied, though they were highly educated. So I couldn’t come home and talk Astronomy at the dinner table, or almost anything else having to do with college. I was expected to do well and not to bother them with it. So I now have a place on my reading table for my latest treasure.

It was interesting that the sale was 4 for $1.00. I only wanted the one book, and I had a bus to catch, so it should have been $1.00 with three more books if I wanted them. But the man at the counter, who was probably working near his limits, called out to me and made me walk back to the counter. He handed me thee quarters because I only wanted the one book. I looked at him for a second and then decided to say, “Thank you.”

Now I’ll have to go back more often. On the bright side, there are wonderful flowers only a block off my normal walk. This one, I hope, is just the beginning.