When I left my 10 room house in Chicago I had to get rid of a lot of things, furniture, kitchenware, books. There’s very little I miss except the books. On Saturday I went to the Carnegie Museum of Art to see a show about Ansel Adams and a trip he took in Yosemite in 1936. It was a pleasant show–nothing extraordinary. But it raised some questions in my mind about his relationship with Georgia O’Keeffe, and whether he was already married at the time. I remembered a book I bought, many years ago, a guidebook to Yosemite written by Adams and his wife. I went looking for it, and of course, it was long gone. I don’t remember that it was anything special. And it certainly would not have answered many of my questions, but my sense of loss was palpable. Losing a book is almost as bad as losing an old friend.