I was served notice by the book police this week, nothing truly criminal but every bit as determined as a real-life summons. I opened the envelope that came to our mailbox from the Monona Public Library with no small amount of trepidation. They’re so strapped for cash they don’t mail anything unless they’re about to get medieval on your heinie. They won’t send actual jackbooted goons to your door, but they will refuse to check out books to you ever again, a punishment an order of magnitude worse than being hauled away in chains. The notice they sent me turned out to be a charge for a lost book, titled The Greatest Show on Earth, that I was pretty sure I never checked out. (I’ll bet they hear that one a lot.)

I was very, very wrong, though. I had the book, I just didn’t realize it. The title made me think of Barnum & Bailey’s, or something else literally circus-like, but it was nothing of the sort. Well, not to me. It was a book about evolution, which I don’t find circus-like but, it turns out, there are many who do. In either case, I’d checked it out about two months ago and it skipped my mind entirely because, even before I’d finished it, My Darling B started reading it too and it ended up in amongst the gaggle of books at her bedside. She emerged from our room holding it triumphantly over her head while I puzzled over the notice. If I heard her right, I think it may have ended up under the bed, but either way it was well-camouflaged, if not completely out of sight, and that’s how I didn’t know I still had it.

While we were on the hunt for that, I ran across another library book that was at least a month overdue, so I logged on to my on-line library profile to make sure I didn’t have any others checked out that I’d forgotten about, and found what do you know – I had. Once again, I went back on the hunt, but before I did that, I updated my e-mail address so when the library sent messages asking me pretty please to bring their books back, I would actually see them more often than once in a coon’s age. Do coons really get very old? They don’t look grumpy enough to be old.