It’s a bad show that casts me as the old man walking in the park with a camera.

Nonetheless, when one has been glued to Facebook, the news (the Turks have settled down to tending the wounded and sharpening their knives; the curtain’s about to open wide on Egypt’s struggle with political mentality) and a blog or two, it’s good to have the Sabbath for leaving the online world in the off mode for a day (almost) and the real space one beneath my feet.

So it was good just walking around the old park.

I was playing guitar and singing back at the apartment when the call came from a friend in Texas who, tired from a long shift at the hospital, wanted to talk about the latest video (in Arabic) from out of Egypt.  For perspective, I brought up the violence portrayed in the old novel The Cry of the Kite, which I finished reading last week.  In that work and in the revolution leading to King Farouk’s abdication of the throne (1952), “Englesi” caught out on the street (or anywhere else) in the riot were in author Maarten Schiemer’s gritty fiction literally torn to pieces.

Or burned.

Having inherited the hardcover — part of the wonder of a decent library may have to do with having at hand overlooked items decades to centuries old and finding cause to open one and become lost in its world — I found quite a few page yet uncut: my father, a career civil servant with M.A.s in economics and political science, had never read it.

Doubtless I will have a few “unreads” of my own around the place when I go, and, God willing, when that time comes, I will have kept my library intact unto the last breath.