somebody abandoned this baby

Do you ever wonder, as you're browsing through the thrift store, what brought someone to leave this particular item here?  Clothes I can understand.  They're suddenly, mysteriously, the wrong size.  Or they're a shocking color that we felt ourselves bold enough to wear in public when we bought them, but upon returning home, discovered that we were just too timid after all. 

The forlorn furniture, too, tells stories of better times for the owners, better tables and couches edging out the mismatched hodgepodge of poorer days. The TVs, printers, and fax machines explain themselves, as do the shelves of dinged-up children's toys.

But sometimes I can't figure it out.  I realize I have a blind spot in this area, and I wonder how anybody could ever give away a book at all, but what about this?

This is a gorgeous, looks-unused children's atlas that was just sitting on the shelf at the thrift store waiting for me.  Look:

When we re-floored, re-shelved, and re-painted the schoolroom, I took two lovely large paper maps, one of the United States, and another of the world, and pinned them to the wall.  They lasted less than a week before the sandblaster that is the little boys scoured them off.  Undaunted, I  bought two lovely large plastic-coated maps and pinned them up in the same spots.  I never found those two maps when they disappeared.  

Because I lack the skill or emotional fortitude to paint maps directly on the wall, we've had to resort to maps in books.  The maps we had in the books on our shelves were sorely lacking in the sort of interesting detail that gets people excited about geography.  Enter...the Dorling Kindersley Children's Atlas.  It's beautiful, the maps are big (the book is too tall for our bookshelves), and it has the kind of tidbits and pictures that leave all of us absorbed in reading about the roots of Caribbean music long after we've found out where Puerto Rico is.  

But I wonder. It's a disease, this wondering, about everything big or small that comes my way.  What prompted someone to leave this book-we-all-adore at the thrift store?  Did someone buy it for children who didn't actually want to learn geography after all?  Maybe a grandparent purchased it as a gift for a family who already had one.  Or maybe, there's some family out there living in a bizarre alternate reality, and they donated the atlas after they'd learned everything it offered, but they used it so gently the whole time that no one would know it had ever been opened.

Nah. It's gotta be something else.

~MB~

Comments

[Nichole]

What an awesome find!

[Lucy]

I actually did donate that identical atlas to a charity shop. For me the reason was it was brought by my mum (she is the one who also gave our non-reading 4 year old a dictionary and thesaurus to help with home education!) and it is too busy, too detailed, too many snippets of information but no "meat". That's not how we teach geography - sometimes, I point out on a globe where a country is in relation to Britain where we live but that is it, mainly we want to imagine ourselves in another country and an atlas doesn't do that for us. So while one day it might be a good fit for us, we don't have the space or inclination to store things, and a book that doesn't work for us is no different to an outgrown or unsuitable item of clothing or a knick knack that has lost its hold on our hearts - it goes to someone - like you! - who will want and use it.