It has been a busy weekend and Monday.

The Christmas lights are down and the tree is placed in its place in the storage unit with the other well-organized but distant items that await their time and season.

I miss the Holidays already, even the packed-to-the-spaces parking spaces at the NorthPark garages. ((The NorthPark Mall is the #1 tourist destination in Dallas – I love it, but not all of it all the time. Let me digress, just a post-seasonal remembered interlude. We were searching for a parking place with my granddaughter, driving aisle-to-aisle, up-and-down, back-and-forth (and I had just about given up), when this polite young man knocked on the girls’ window (they are the prettier) and said follow me and take my space. We did and watched “Life of Pi” and enjoyed it muchly, even my first-grader granddaughter.))

Mars is a long way away, but not that far it seems.

For John Carter, that young Confederate Captain, it was a chase from Apache Indians and the refuge of a very odd cave in the New Mexico mountains that brought him to “A Princess of Mars.” I first found the book in this odd narrow room lined with books at the top of the stairs of the old farm house in Oxford, Iowa. The only heat was from the great belching noisy furnace in the basement, which loved noise more than heat, so that none seemed to reach us in our multi-covered-and-quilted beds on the second floor up the narrow stairs when we over-nighted at Grandma and Grandpa’s farm. I have no idea where they slept. It was as if we were on another planet — with chamber pots on the floor (quite the experience for a bookish city boy and his introspective sight). After breakfast in the warmed and added-on kitchen (everything is added in an old farm house), I’d sneak back up and visit that long little room with all the paperbacks. Edgar Rice Burroughs and many more of those writing persons lived there behind the worn-and-frayed bindings facing the wide-eyed face of a young wonderer. I found them there and never left them. Except, it is hard to keep reading on a raft with a tiger . . . a hungry tiger . . . at that. But, perhaps, that is what reading is all about, a frozen upstairs sanctuary in the midst of winter looking out over ice-covered fields and inward across an expanse of moss-covered heather at another planet.

So, we parked the car and glided through the throngs of strangely and pleasantly dressed mall crawlers to our theatre and our next view of life in its strangely placed wonders.

A good book is often in the eye of the beholder,

Or, in the eye of the tiger.

What do you see?

Grandpa Jim

PS: Snow in Dallas this morning!! The picture is in the early-still-dark morning hour, looking across the rooftops to downtown. The white flakes and cold covering are fun to wake to, but not to drive in. Dallas stops in the snow and works from home, if we can. Stay warm and have some hot chocolate.