Gooshing My Way Through A Problem.

We went to an apple orchard on Saturday, which was fun but I couldn't really relax because a portion of my mind was occupied with the Library Problem.

The Library Problem is this, in a nutshell: how long can I keep an overdue book before it becomes more cost effective to either go buy it myself or claim I lost it and pay the Library for it?

The Library Problem arises a lot, these days, because I'm making more and more use of the Library since I discovered that I can make them do all the work for me by going online and requesting books. At our library, you can set up an account and then go online and click on books and CDs and videos and they'll set them aside and email you when they're ready for pickup, so I can get all that stuff without having to go wander around the library myself and look for them; that's important because, to be honest, libraries have a way of sucking the fun out of things, even relatively cool libraries like the one I go to, with its open layout and computer stations and kid's area with beanbag chairs and puzzles -- a kid's area where I tried to have the boys play, only to see Mr Bunches take off like he was shot from a cannon, while Mr F tried to pull the books out and eat them.

I think the problem with libraries is the books. Library books are, in theory, the same as the books you buy at Barnes & Noble or Waldenbooks or the local bookstore down on the funky part of town, the kind of bookstore people go to when they're snobs who don't believe that book "superstores" are a good thing. Those are the same kind of people who claim they don't watch TV, and I don't like them.

Library books, though, differ from real books that can be bought in a store. The words are the same, the titles are the same, but the book itself lacks a certain amount of fun. It might be the covers. Library books have those plastic covers on them that remind me of the plastic mats my grandparents always had leading into their house, mats we had to stop and take off our shoes on before we went any further into their house and messed it up. Not that we minded taking off our shoes; most of the time when we went to Grandma and Grandpa's house it was for a special occasion, so we had "nice" shoes on and our "nice" shoes were both uncomfortably stiff and always a little too big or too small; as a kid, you get shoes bought for you only periodically and you have to grow into them, so for 90% of the shoe's life, it's too big and you clonk around at Thanksgiving and Christmas Eve and then some dumb party with too-big shoes, only to find, next year, when Thanksgiving comes around again and you have to get the shoes out, that they're a little too small, but it's Thanksgiving Day and there's no time to get new shoes, so you ride to Grandma and Grandpa's house holding the pumpkin pie carefully on your lap and fighting the urge to just poke your thumb into the topping because that feels really really cool, the way it squishes, and trying to distract yourself from how much your feet hurt because the shoes are a little too small.

Plus, taking off your shoes at Grandma and Grandpa's house was welcome because it meant that you'd get that much more relief from the incredible heat of their house. Fuel oil for furnaces must have been cheaper than air when I was a kid, because even stingy grandparents who grew up in the Depression and whose idea of a great Christmas present was a plaid shirt from Sears and an NFL pencil set with a pencil for each of the teams, even those type of grandparents kept the furnace blazing away at 115 degrees. As I look back now, I suspect they kept it that hot to slowly calm down the grandkids -- us-- by baking them ever so slightly as the day went on, so that while when we first arrived we had more than enough energy to get into fights about whether a shot counted on the pool table if you didn't intend to make that shot (the single dumbest rule we ever created for that pool table, which slanted slightly to the left and which meant that you were always better off calling most of your shots for the corner pocket) -- while we had that level of energy at the start, by the end of the day it was all we could do to hold our heads up in the den and mumble arguments about who was hogging the reclining rocker chair that spun in an entire circle.

That's why library book covers suck some of the fun out of books - -they keep you from really touching the book. Then there's the illustrations that are on the covers of the books. When a book is sitting on the shelf in the store, it's got some cool illustration and it's shiny and appears three-dimensional and begs you to pick it up. But that same exact book in the library has a flatly two-dimensional illustration that appears to have been the third runner up in Miss Bergum's "Illustrate This Book" Contest at my old elementary school.

Here's an example. Here's the book "The Subtle Knife" as it appears on the bookshelf in the store:



That cover is excellent, isn't it? It really tells you that something magical and wondrous and fascinating is going to happen. Compare it with this cover, which was the cover of the book The Subtle Knife that I took out of the library:



Now, what is that? This is exactly what I thought when I looked that cover: Pleh. Then, I thought this: Who is that forty-year-old woman on the left? Then I thought this Is that cat all right?

So you can see the problem; see that second cover in a library, and you'll just keep on walking past the book -- especially if you're trying to find Mr Bunches. I imagine that there's a really, really, third-rate art school somewhere where people go to learn to do library-book-cover-illustrations, with a teacher walking around behind them going No, no, make sure the perspective is a little more off. Here, make one eye larger than the other and suggesting color palates that remind you of the creamed corn your grandmother used to serve at Thanksgiving.

Discovering that the library would get the books I requested ready for me, so I could just go in and get them and not have the fun sucked out of me and/or lose the twins was a godsend to me; I could browse for books online, find them, request them, and pick them up.

The Library Problem arises from the fact that others can do that, too -- and when they do, the library puts a hold on your book and won't let you renew it online. (The library also puts a limit on the total number of renewals, even if nobody else in the world is requesting the book; I don't know why they do that. If nobody else wants the book, what does it matter if I want to keep it longer? They know where it is, after all.)

I discovered that I could get around the hold, online, by asking the computer to renew my book twice -- a glitch I imagine the library never knew existed until I found it, and which I discovered only accidentally, by insisting, to the computer, that I wanted to renew my book. I went online, and tried to renew it, but got a message that I couldn't because someone else had requested the book. I stubbornly clicked the "renew" box again and saw, to my surprise, that it worked! I had outsmarted the library and renewed my book and to the guy or girl who was waiting for it... well, I'm sorry, but possession is 9/10 of the law, and stubbornly clicking the box again is the other 1/10th, so I've got the whole of the law on my side.

Even that little maneuver had a limit, though -- eventually, the library just won't let you renew the book anymore, under any circumstances, and that's the point I reached this past Saturday morning -- I couldn't renew the two books that were overdue, marked in red on my library account home page.

Let me take this moment to note that I routinely go and check my library account page for updates and make sure that my books are not overdue and see what new books and videos and the like I can request; meanwhile, my first payment on my new credit account was overdue by 45 days because I forgot about it. Sweetie has now taken over making those payments for me; I continue to monitor my library account myself.

To make matters worse, not only could I not renew the two books, which I am not done with because these days I only read about 1-2 pages before falling asleep or getting distracted by Invader Zim, but there was a new CD in that I really really wanted to listen to, only I worried that if I went to pick it up, the library would refuse to give me the CD because I had no intention of returning the books yet, and then the librarian would have to give me that frown, the same frown they gave me when I finally paid the $10 overdue fee for having almost lost the Paul Simon "Old" CD; I didn't lose it, but it was missing for a long time and then I returned it when I found it, and they insisted that I pay a late fee that was equal to the cost of the CD in the first place, which seems unfair to me, and which seemed more unfair when I realized that for the $10 bucks, I could have just kept the CD in the first place, and now they had the CD and they wanted ten dollars, which I very reluctantly paid because I was in the library to pick up a book and needed to use my own library card as I'd forgotten to bring Sweetie's with me -- I'd been using Sweetie's library card for over a year at that point because I didn't want to pay what I viewed as an unjust fine, but then I forgot to grab Sweetie's card and I was at the library getting my new books and a DVD and I only had my card, so I paid the fine but I vowed, too, that I'd get back at the library, and I will but I don't know how yet.

That's what was really occupying my mind when we went to the apple orchard on Saturday: trying to calculate how long it would take me to finish the books, how much of a late fee I'd pay for keeping them, and whether I would be better off just returning the books and going to buy them at the store, which I knew, too, that I wasn't going to do. I can't simply return the book and then go back to it someday; if I take a book out of the library and then return it, it's over for me. I can't read that book again, whether it's from the library or the store. I don't even know why. It's like wires get crossed in my mind, wires from the part of my mind that think I really like this book and want to finish it getting accidentally routed over to this book sure stinks, and so I never can return a book and go back to get it and start it again.

All of that was weighing heavily on my mind as we got to the apple orchard, which, surprisingly, was about a minute or two from the mall. Our city is slowly carving into the farmland around us and spreading at an alarming or pleasing rate, depending on your perspective; it's pleasing for me, because whenever I see it spreading, I get to say things like Remember when this was all farmland? Look how built up it is, which gives me something to say in the car to fill up gaps in the conversation and cover up those embarrassing pauses when Sweetie might otherwise start to suspect that I'm not listening.

Even with that buildup, I was surprised at how close the apple orchard was to the city and its strip malls and pizza places, and also at how little it looked like I'd pictured an apple orchard looking like, and also at the gang of thug-like teenagers sitting menacingly by the duck pond, which disappointed me because I like duck ponds. There were five or six of them, all teenagers, and they did not appear overtly menacing, they weren't all dressed in black or carrying switchblades or dancing and snapping their fingers and claiming to be a Jet all the way or anything, but something about the way they sat there, flicking rocks into the pond and slouching, made them seem untoward to me, made them seem like any second they'd pull out the Marlboros they's swiped from Dad and start making fun of me. So we couldn't take Mr F and Mr Bunches by the duck pond, but Sweetie probably wouldn't have allowed it anyway, because Mr F and Mr Bunches were likely to try to get into the duck pond and fishing Babies! out of a pond isn't considered a relaxing Sunday morning in anyone's book.

I'd always pictured apple orchards being filled with row upon row of trees, in neat long stretches, with wide spaces between them where people would walk down below the trees, looking up at the apple trees and occasionally stopping to pick some low-hanging fruit, while sipping their apple cider and breathing the crisp fall air and pondering how long they have to pretend to be enjoying this before everyone can turn around, go home, and watch TV. But this orchard didn't look anything like that. Instead, after the duck pond and teenagers, there was a motley assortment of pumpkins spread out near a bunch of wheelbarrows, then a mowed-down cornfield, and off to the left were some small, stunted-looking twisty trees that spread out but which were too low to walk underneath, and too close together to walk between.

That was the orchard, as I found out when I loaded Mr Bunches and Mr F into a wheelbarrow and carried them over there while Sweetie went to the gift shop. Mr Bunches and Mr F and I got over to the cluster of trees and I realized it was the orchard not because I'm great at recognizing apple trees -- my only previous experience with an apple tree was with the one that grew in the field just behind our house when we were kids, a tree my parents always warned us not to eat the apples off of. They never said why we shouldn't eat them; I always assumed it was because the ground was laced with some kind of poison that was swept up into the apples, so I always tried to avoid even touching the tree or the apples.

Instead, I knew it was the orchard because the ground was covered with apples that had dropped off the trees in the thousands, creating a carpet of apples that were slowly rotting and which were perfect for the twins to pick up and begin throwing at anything that moved including each other, and perfect for the twins to goosh into in their shoes, too, and then sit down on rotten-apple-mush.

That's how we killed the time, them gooshing apples and me trying to keep them from running into the cornfield or throwing apples at the people who walked by, carrying bags and little maps of the kinds of apple trees, going off to pick their own apples in an effort to enjoy this trip until they, too, could get home and watch TV.

I had to let Mr F and Mr Bunches goosh apples as much as possible, though, because they had to let out steam; before going to the orchard, we'd taken them to try to watch The Boy's football game that morning, a less-than-successful outing. It was less-than-successful because it took so long to get the Babies! ready that we missed the first quarter; then I didn't see any of the second quarter because I was chasing Mr F and Mr Bunches around the stands while they picked up Skittles off the ground and tried to eat them. Once they realized that trying to eat the dirty Skittles made Daddy crazy, it became their favorite game: Pick up a Skittle off the ground, and take off running, holding it over your head while you tried to get far enough away to stick it in your mouth. I kept fighting them on it; I may let the boys eat McGriddles off the O'Hare Airport floor, but even I have standards.

And questions. I have standards, and I have questions. My standards include No eating Skittles off the bleacher floors at football games. My questions include Why are there so many freaking Skittles on the ground here? Did a Skittle truck explode?

In between Skittle Running, the Boys also took their balls and dropped them off the bleachers onto the warning track around the field and tried to escape into the parking lot. I finally settled them down, and missed the third quarter, by sitting them at a picnic table with a healthy snack of Cheetos, chocolate chip cookies, and orange soda. At 10 a.m. To make it a little more responsible-seeming, I kept referring to the orange soda as "orange juice."

Eventually, the Boys slowed down a little and took to mostly sitting on the apples, and just as eventually, Sweetie came out of the gift shop carrying an apple pie and a bag of apples that had been pre-picked before we arrived there, and she mentioned to me that they were the kind she liked. When I stared blankly at her, she said "Macintoshes." When I continued to stare blankly, she described what a Macintosh apple was and why she liked it. I mostly just wondered if that was the kind of information I'm expected to retain, that she likes "Macintosh" apples, or even just the information that there are different kinds of apples; to me, apples come in "red" and "green" varieties. That makes me the odd man out in my family, because everyone else appears to have a background in apple genetics; when we went home, for example, Sweetie had this exchange with The Boy:

Sweetie: We got apples there.

The Boy: Are they Macintosh apples?

How does a 16-year-old who can't remember whether it's legal to make a right-turn on red, who claims that the teacher didn't tell them about the 15 page essay on the book they've been reading all quarter until today, the day before it's due, how can that 16-year-old know the various kinds of apples?

I didn't successfully store that information away, though; I only recall, as I'm sitting here two days later, that Macintosh apples exist, and beyond that and the fact that the apples in the decorative bowl on our counter are, apparently, Macintosh apples, I retained nothing about them. I probably don't need to, I guess, since everyone else in my family can spot a Macintosh apple from three miles away and probably tell you the history of the Macintosh apple while they're at it. And I have better things to do. Like working on the Library Problem.