The Bookless Club: Do you use the library?

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There is a sign at the Dunbar Public Library branch, which reads: “A good library has something to offend everyone.” And that is as it should be. It goes without saying that it will also have something to delight everyone.

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Jane Macdougall is a freelance writer and former National Post columnist who lives in Vancouver. She writes The Bookless Club every Saturday online and in The Vancouver Sun. For more of what Jane’s up to, check out her website, janemacdougall.com

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This week’s question for readers:

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Question: Do you use the library?

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Send your answers by email text, not an attachment, in 100 words or less, along with your full name to Jane at [email protected]. We will print some next week in this space.

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Previous question for readers:

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Question: What are your tales from ‘lost and found’?

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• All my life I have been very lucky in finding things, and I mean hundreds of items. Four weeks ago, in our townhouse complex, I came across a rechargeable Ryobi variable drill and left a note at the spot I found it. No one claimed it, so it is now in my toolbox. About four years ago, I came across a discarded box of 12 books, so I took them to put in our local community library box. I fanned out the pages in case there was money in the pages, and when I got to the eighth book I found seven $100 bills.

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Rick Fearman

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• When Mike and I walked the Camino de Santiago, he wore his beloved (and absurdly expensive) Borsalino hat. One day, it vanished. We had a pact never to retrace our steps, so we just kept going, joking that the hat would find us if it really wanted to. For several days, word spread that a group of “Frenchies” were searching for “the Canadian man with the white backpack.” They had the hat. We kept walking. The reunion in a Foncebadón mountain hostel a week later felt like something out of a pilgrimage rom‑com. After finishing the 800 km walk, we went to London for 10 days. There, in a thrift shop, Mike found a vintage Borsalino for a bargain‑basement price. So in the end, we left with one hat, lost one hat, and somehow returned home with two.

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Debra Dolan

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• My lady friend had presented me with a St. Christopher medallion to keep me safe on a seven-month backpacking tour of Europe in 1975. After my safe return, I was cycling and didn’t notice it fall off, but later I found it caught on the chain guard. On another occasion, I was diving from the high board. The force ripped off the chain and it sank to the bottom. The next day, I asked at the lost and found and, miraculously, the filter had captured it. I still have the medallion to this day.

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Gerry van der Wolf

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• While I was away on a trip, I kept checking my bags for a pair of earrings I thought I had packed. Nope, not in my belongings. I must have left them at home, but kept fretting about them, checking the place where we stayed. Upon my return, I checked the places I usually keep them, but they were nowhere to be found. After more searching and praying to St. Anthony, the patron saint of lost things, I went into my room and there they were laying on my comforter at the end of my bed. You figure that one out.

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Trudy Halliday

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• I visit an older friend once a year, and one time while knocking on his front door, I noticed a pair of those sunglasses that clip onto your regular glasses sitting on an adjacent bannister. When he answered the door, I asked him why he had left them there. His face lit up and he happily proclaimed “Oh my goodness, I’ve been looking for those things for three days.”

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David Lindsay

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• My father insisted all his lost things had been stolen. When he found them, he’d announce, “Well, they brought it back.” Our sanity-saver came from an elderly Hungarian lady: “Whatever the house takes, the house gives back … just not when you want it.” She’s right. Keys resurface in an old coat, glasses in the garden, the remote in a drawer. Once, a passport turned up on top of the hot water tank at a holiday rental, discovered too late to catch our flight home. Never anywhere sensible, never found during the search. Now I just wait. The thieves and the house work in shifts