Say Goodbye

After giving a lecture at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre this weekend, I went to the public library and returned an unfinished book.

I wasn't able to finish the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Goldfinch before the book is due. I could not renew the library loan because it has been reserved by someone else.

Saying goodbye (for a moment) to this book isn't hard. Riding the emotional roller coaster with the story's narrator Theo Decker is.

It's a very tough thing to see how Theo lost his mum during a terrorist bomb attack, got carried away when he met a red-haired girl who was also injured and then (literally) carried away. I decided to take a break. At the beginning it was because they wouldn't allow me to keep the book, and at the end because I didn't want to. I should borrow the book later, not now.

So that was the plan.

As it turned out, I borrowed another book: Too Soon to Say Goodbye by the Pulitzer Prize winner (again) Art Buchwald. Buchwald wrote the book when he was in a hospice after declining dialysis. He shared his dream that he have an air ticket reservation to go to heaven. He went to the terminal and looked at the list of flights. Heaven is at the last gate.

Buchwald went up to the departure desk and asked, "Am I entitled to frequent flyer miles?"

The agent said, "You won't need any, because you're not coming back."

The next thing he heard was the loudspeaker announcement, "Because of inclement weather, today's flight to heaven has been cancelled. You can come back tomorrow and we'll put you on standby."