For months I carried a box of books around in my car. They weren’t the easy ones to get rid of, the ones you donate to the library book sale. Those were already long gone.

Some of these were cherished friends from a life of teaching writing and language. When I finally pushed myself to get the dratted box and its contents out of the car, where they’d been jostling for space for months, a friend at a local university graciously took that lot.  Then there was the Irish-English dictionary (don’t ask), destined for a winsome waitress at the sushi place who is studying Gaelic.

And that left just one. A dictionary of a different order: A Webster’s from probably sometime in the 1940s that I had been lugging with me for some six decades. It was bequeathed to me in 1963, just as I was about to head off to college. It came from my sister’s roommate at the apartment they were sharing on S. Paul’s Street in Baltimore, where I was spending the summer. I don’t know why Holly gave it to me. Maybe because I was going off to a place where I’d need one, and she knew I didn’t have much money.

Six decades. So here’s the problem: Things. Like a problem child, a thing may be dear to my heart, but who else besides me is going to love it enough to take it on? A tattered, out-of-date, SO out-of-date dictionary in a world where if I want a definition and a whole lot more about any given word, I can simply Google it? Not to mention that my life in the world of words had also brought me a much newer Webster’s, not to mention a Roget’s Thesaurus, a hardback Chicago Manual of Style, and a whole bunch more.

I carried Holly’s dictionary off to college with me and then to innumerable places as time went by. I am among the thousands (maybe more) of people on the planet who have a mental block about getting rid of things, even when they’ve (apparently) long outlived their usefulness. I don’t know what stops others – affection, sentimentality, memories, there’s a whole bunch of perfectly good reasons – but for me, it’s just that if I am going to let something go, I don’t want to abandon it. want to know that it’s going to a good home.

But this faithful but very bedraggled old dictionary … you see the problem. Nevertheless, I had picked a destination, though not without misgivings. I knew where this dictionary was headed – to the only place I could think of: One of the little outdoor book kiosks scattered around our community, in parks, playgrounds, wherever people gather and spend time just hanging out. Especially parents and children, where a mom or dad might pull out a Golden book or something about dinosaurs or dragons or ponies or princesses to read to little Jessie or Jason, or find a book to occupy themselves while the kids are on the swings.

But even then I feared for its life. I foresaw that some efficient busybody would see that a really ratty, possibly unclean, clearly obsolete dictionary had no place in the realm of legitimate reading matter, remove it, and send it off to the recycling center bins. And so it rode around with me for months, until finally one day I was passing the playground by the creek, right on my way home, and I pulled over, jumped out, and carried it to the kiosk.

Then I straightened the kiosk up. The books were a mix of kids’ and grownups’ fare and all jumbled up. I set the bigger ones upright and stacked the skinnier ones, pausing only to peruse a little handmade book called “Alligator,” clearly created by a school kid and relating the tale of the boy who escaped. It was lovely.

I shelved Holly’s Webster’s at the bottom of the stack, under some volumes of Biblical stories. I resolutely said farewell, still full of misgivings, and departed. I was certain that was the end of it. The book would soon be en route to its final destination.

A few days later, driving home, I passed the playground again, and I had to know the worst. Pulled over, got out, crossed to the kiosk – and Lo! The battered old dictionary was there. And it was on the TOP of the pile. Someone had – investigated? Amused themselves? Looked up an obsolete word?

I rejoiced. But before I put it back, I opened it and turned to the T’s. And here you have it: The definitions – and there are many – of “time.” Tempus fugit. And you’ll find the Webster’s where I left it – at the bottom of the pile, in the little book kiosk.