Sure enough. A cross-legged Missy sitting just inside the bay window, crayons and tea close to hand. Watching the world. Watching the street.

Watching for me.

I came inside, collected a smile and a hug. “Hey, Miss-a Melissa. Was it a good day today?”
“Uh-huh.”

And with that, I know I’m home.

It’s been interesting being on the other side of this. Growing up, I was always the one waiting – though never, perhaps, as intently as my little sisters. They were the ones who would stand in the garage and chant, with the enthusiasm of a cheerleader and the certainty of an invocation “Daddy come home! Daddy come home!”

He always did.

Now, for the past year, it’s been my turn. Granted, I’ve had my lovely wife Heather to return to for long before that, along with the mixed nervousness and excitement of Duchess the Wonder Dog. But Missy, our developmentally disabled ward, is in a class by herself. Sometimes, she may spend an hour or two just waiting in the window, ready for the family to be complete.

It’s a little humbling. Are hugs and stories and “I love you’s” really worth so much?

Of course.

“Parenting and guardianship is on-the-job training,” Mom reminded me over the Mother’s Day weekend. “The main part is consistently being on the job.”

The more I think on that, the more I like it.

In a world that often obsesses on quality time, we often forget the power of big fat chunks of quantity time. The importance of just being there, even if we’re not constantly engaged in enlightening activities that would win the Bill Cosby Seal of Approval.

Looking back on my own childhood, I can remember some great experiences with Mom and Dad: trips to the movies, travel to the Northwest, nights spent reading together. But most of all, I remember them. Knowing they were close, knowing they cared, something more important than any set-piece activity.

I know, it’s not always possible. There may be nights that require working late, blizzards that clog the road home, even military duties that call a piece of the family away for months at a time. The times when someone has to carry you in their heart for a little while.

But it’s a lot easier to carry someone in your heart if you’ve first carried them in your eyes.

The amazing thing – almost frightening, really – is how quickly and quietly it builds. Every morning spent fighting with shoelaces, every evening spent helping with the toothbrush, is another stroke on the canvas. Ordinary moments, even frustrating ones, sometimes.

But give it enough time, and without warning, the ordinary becomes extraordinary.

“You go’n to work?” Missy asks, now from the couch.

“Not this time,”I tell her. “Tonight, you’ve got me.”

In the window seat, the crayons wait. Later, we may go there together, to read and smile and watch the world go by.

But for tonight, the vigil is done. Tonight, the watch can wait until the next return journey.

Tonight, I know I’m home.

Impossible not to, really. Because while Sendak could be a cantankerous old coot, he was a fun cantankerous old coot. And really, how could you not like someone who admitted that the faces of his Wild Things came from childhood memories of his Brooklyn relatives?

“They came almost every Sunday and there was my week-long anxiety about their coming the next Sunday,” he told an interviewer. “They’d lean way over with their bad teeth and hairy noses and say something threatening like ‘You’re so cute I could eat you up.’ And I knew if my mother didn’t hurry up with the cooking, they probably would.”

Now, like his misbehaving Max, Sendak has sailed off on a journey of his own. A stroke closed the book at age 83.

I’m saying that about too many authors lately, aren’t I?

It’s a funny thing about Sendak, though. With most of my childhood writers and illustrators, I get a clear picture in my head, a portrait of their work and what it meant to me. With Sendak, the picture is more like a Magic Eye, one image hidden inside another.

Because while I knew Maurice Sendak as the man who knew “Where the Wild Things Are,” I also knew him as the illustrator of Little Bear.

Remember Little Bear? A little two-legged bear cub who always seemed slightly worn, where Mother and Grandmother and a host of friends were always close to hand. His stories were the softer ones of childhood, imagining a trip to the moon, or getting ready to play in the snow, or having a thank-you kiss passed to him from Grandmother Bear through a relay of half-a-dozen others.

A very different style from Max in his wolf suit.

Or maybe not.

Maybe, just maybe, Sendak had a more complete picture of childhood than most. He knew the gentle side, knew that there could be curiosity and learning and affection.

But he wouldn’t ignore the other side. The one where kids can be brats. Where children also argue with their parents, do what they shouldn’t, get lonely, get scared.

“I refuse to lie to children,” he told an interviewer for The Guardian.

“I think it’s unnatural to think that there is such a thing as a blue sky, white cloud and a happy childhood for anybody,” he said to NPR “Childhood is a very, very, tricky business of surviving it.”

Reading that, I can remember a few less lovely parts of my own childhood.

Like barricading my door against my sisters when I didn’t want them in my bedroom – or pestering them incessantly when I did.

Like my first and only schoolyard fight, which I waited almost two years to tell my family about. (I almost won … which is a nice way of saying I lost.)

Like the night I sat at the table, dinner uneaten, until Dad came home – and he worked late in those days.

Remembering those moments, Max resonates strongly. The moments where the real Wild Things woke up.

But Wild Things can be commanded and made to obey.

“And when he came to the place where the wild things are, they roared their terrible roars and gnashed their terrible teeth and rolled their terrible eyes and showed their terrible claws till Max said, ‘Be still’ and tamed them with the magic trick of staring into all their yellow eyes without blinking once.”

Don’t blink. Don’t ignore or pretend they aren’t there. Face them down … and in so doing, master them.

That may be one of the first, best lessons of growing up I know.

So thank you, Mr. Sendak. Thanks for both the sweet and the savage, the gentle and the crazy. It’s been a fun ride together.

In fact, it’s been pretty Wild.

So far, I’ve seen a presidential candidate (now former) promise to put a man on the moon.

I’ve seen a member of Congress hold up a list of hidden Communists in Washington, D.C.

And now there’s plans to build an unsinkable ship called the Titanic.

Yes, seriously.

Credit this one to Australian billionaire Clive Palmer. He plans to launch a new Titanic sometime in 2016, built to the same dimensions and even starting on the same route – but designed to avoid the same finish.

“It will be designed as a modern ship with all the technology to ensure that doesn’t happen,” Palmer told Reuters on Monday.

Will someone sign the gentleman up for Missing The Point 101, please?

First of all, there’s nothing remarkable in designing a cruise ship that doesn’t sink. Most of them don’t. It’s like bragging that you’ve built an individual airliner that won’t crash – the odds are good that you’ll never have to test your claim.

Second, there’s no real reason to do it, beyond separating a lot of tourists from a lot of money. (Itself a good enough reason for most businessmen, admittedly.) If Titanic II sails safely into New York, it won’t magically bring back the passengers from Titanic I. It won’t even prove the first Titanic could have done it, since it won’t be using the same tools.

But most importantly, it ignores one of the biggest lessons of the Titanic – how the humility of failure can teach more than the pride of success.

I first heard the theory floated (sorry) by an engineer and author named Henry Petroski during an NPR interview. In it, he noted that if the Titanic had sailed safely, there would have been nothing historically remarkable about it. It would have made money and had imitators, like any other successful product.

But the flaws in its design would have still been there. They might have even been exaggerated as competitors tried to build it bigger and better. Sooner or later, overconfidence would get the same payoff – maybe even worse.

“When we have a success, a prolonged period of success, we tend to become more complacent,” Petroski said. “We tend to become overconfident that we’re doing it right, that we’ve got it figured out finally. And then, of course, a failure occurs and wakes us up out of our dream.”

And that’s when the learning comes – when you’re willing to acknowledge that mistakes are possible, that you can screw up, that’s when you really begin scrutinizing your work.

It almost sounds un-American, I know. We have an ideal of almost hyper-competency, that a free people can go anywhere, accomplish anything. And honestly, I’m glad when people dream big; that’s where a lot of great ideas start.

But it’s that dash of humility – that willingness to admit that maybe this time we don’t know everything – that can keep those big dreams from becoming bigger nightmares.

It’s something teachers drill into their students, that editors drill into their reporters: don’t get cocky, check your work. It’s an attitude all too rare in politics anymore, where the appearance of being right seems to matter more than the reality.

And it’s the only way to guard against a Titanic error.

Mr. Palmer, may you have the best of luck and happy sailing. But if Titanic II arrives on time, it won’t be because of unsinkable confidence. It’ll be because everyone acknowledged the worst and planned for it.

Meanwhile, I wish you well.

In fact, with the headlines lately, maybe I should wish you Wells.

Not a serious one. Just a hard landing on bathroom tile, the kind that leaves your arm sore for a while afterward. No breaks. No bruises.

It still makes you wince, though. Or should. It’s part of being a guardian, a parent, an adult. When you care for someone, you don’t want to see them hurt.

I only wish every adult felt the same way.

My mind’s been on the topic lately thanks to Stuart Chaifetz. You’ve probably heard the story. Like me and my wife, Chaifetz has someone who needs special care – for us, a developmentally disabled adult, for him, his autistic 10-year-old son, Akian.

Chaifetz got worried when Akian started lashing out in school, even hitting a teacher and his aide. Six months of meetings failed to uncover why. Chaifetz knew he needed to know what was happening at school, but Akian lacked the ability to tell him.

So he put a wire on his son. Secretly tape-recorded his school day.

The result horrified him. Adults yelling at the students, mocking the students, humiliating and threatening the students. One told Akian “you are a bastard” and warned him “Go ahead and scream, because guess what? You’re going to get nothing …until your mouth is shut.”

“What I heard on that audio was so disgusting, vile, and just an absolute disrespect and bullying of my son, that happened not by other children, but by his teacher, and the aides — the people who were supposed to protect him,” Chaifetz said in a video that has shot across the Internet.”They were literally making my son’s life a living hell.”

It’s an anger I can feel echo inside my own soul.

I hate bullies. Old, young, in between. I endured too much of it myself as a kid to ever want to see it in another. It’s a pain that makes days something to be feared instead of anticipated, a trial you don’t dare talk about until you have to.

And when the victim literally can’t talk about it, that is the lowest of the low.

Heather and I have cared for Missy the Wonderful for about a year now. I know that if we ever sniffed the slightest hint of mistreatment by someone else, we’d be on it like a shot, doing what we had to to pin it down and turn it off.

When you care for someone, you don’t want to see them hurt.

But how do you know?

How do you ever know?

It’s a simple answer and a hard one at the same time. To quote a character from Missy’s Harry Potter books, it takes “Constant vigilance!” Granted, you don’t need the paranoia of Mad-Eye Moody … but it all starts with watchfulness.

Whoever you care for, be it a child or a charge, nobody knows them like you. How can they? You’ve lived with them. You love them. You’ve seen them at their best and their worst.

And you know – or can know – when something seems wrong. Even without words. It can be a change in mood or behavior like Akian’s. Or maybe a wariness around a particular person. Or anything that silently screams to you “This is not normal behavior. Something is going on.”

Maybe you’ll be wrong sometimes. But better to be careful without need, than to need care and not show it. A sad truth, perhaps, but real.

If you heard a crash and an “Ouch!” in the bathroom, you’d check it out. This isn’t any different.

When you care for someone, you don’t want to see them hurt.

And let’s face it. There’s going to be enough painful falls in life as it is.

Nobody needs to be pushed.

It was that kind of news.

“We have to put Quaccia down.”

For as long as I knew him – and I only knew the ol’ guy for a small part of his 14 years – Quaccia was the poster child for the idea of “Family Dog.” Big. Friendly. A little clumsy sometimes, a little slobbery sometimes. But with fur that was made for comfort and a heart made of solid gold.

The name, pronounced “Qua-cha,” came from a minor league ballplayer. That was the only thing minor league about him. The whole family could tell you that.

Funny thing, though. When I think of Quaccia, or Q as he often got dubbed, one image keeps coming back to mind. A picture taken right after my nephew Gil was born. The baby asleep,  Q curled up alongside his rocker, totally comfortable, totally protective, the message clear as crystal.

“This is my buddy. Mine. You want to get to him, you’ve got to get past me.”

Somehow, I know that’s the Q that’s going to stay with me.

We do that a lot with those we love, it seems. Somewhere along the line, a picture gets set in your brain – maybe an actual photograph, maybe just a strongly-held memory – that seems to epitomize someone, to crystalize all your memories of them in one place. A thought that captures a life.

If it seems strongest with pets, it may be because they compress so much love into so short a time, leaving behind those pictures to last a lifetime. I know that my own mental photo album holds a lot of loved animals, both here and gone, caught at a moment that says “Yes. This is me.”

Our rescue dog Duchess, grinning in the mountains, free of anxiety for the first time in too long.

The eyes of our cat Twinkle, gleaming from behind the headboard of a bed at night, waiting for a finger to be dangled down.

Our bearded collie Max, charging a guest at full tilt in love and excitement. Or the cautious orbit of my folks’ dog, Hailey, a distant background presence taking the measure of a stranger – for days, sometimes.

Each one just a moment in the life. Each one as true as if it had happened yesterday. Each one real, in a way that any velveteen rabbit could understand.

There’s a danger, of course. Sometimes we become too reliant on the shorthand, let the reality fade as the picture replaces it. But usually, I find, it’s the opposite. Like a bookmark in a novel or a shortcut on a computer monitor, that single image unlocks an entire story. By holding on to the tip, you can suddenly raise the entire iceberg.

That’s a comfort. Even a joy.

It makes me wonder what pictures I’ve left in others’ minds. Maybe I’d laugh. Maybe I’d cringe. Or maybe it’s just enough that they’re there, lasting and defiant in the face of time.

As solid and real as a big ol’ dog by a sleeping baby.

Thanks for that, Quaccia.

Thank Q very much.

A forceful finger poked out an “M” on the keyboard. Then quickly, several more. “MMMMMMMM.”

“Right! Now how about the second letter?”

A little hesitation. The finger searched, hovered, and finally came down on the “I.”

“Good job!”

After a while, and more stops and backups than an overloaded railway line, we were finally there. She had finally typed “MISSY.” Granted, she had also typed “MSSAY,” “MSSBI” and a few other variations, but nothing comes without practice.

And practice is exactly what we’ve started to do.

Missy, my wife’s developmentally disabled aunt, has been fascinated by Heather’s keyboard for a long time. No reason she shouldn’t be. Since we moved in a year ago to take care of her, we’ve used it to listen to tunes, watch videos and – Missy’s personal favorite – flip though family pictures.

Always with help, though. Missy doesn’t read.

A year ago, I would have said “can’t read.” Now, I’m not so sure. Her letter recognition is pretty good. And while she says maybe 100 words out loud a week, the flow is increasing, often in ways that suggest there’s more going on behind her eyes than we know.

While watching a bowling program with several 7-10 splits, we’ll hear “Those pins will not go down!”

As Heather tries to maneuver in a Christmas-crowded parking lot, Missy will shout out the window at passersby “Get out of the way!”

And a marathon story time session got just a little longer when she picked up the book, handed it back to me and instructed me “Don’t stop.”

The words are there. The understanding is there, however curious at times. Even the letters are there, if sometimes hesitantly.

What if? What if she could forge the link between what she says and what she sees?

I’m not expecting “The Miracle Worker.” But things just that unlikely have happened.

A certain video makes the Internet rounds every so often. It’s the story of Carly Fleischmann, a girl with severe autism who never said a word for her first 11 years of life. Her parents and therapists worked with her, pushed her, never gave up on her.

And in 2006, there was a payoff. After years of silence, Carly sat down and began to type. Words. Sentences. Paragraphs. As the days went by, it was clear that the girl who had been written off as “retarded” was actually quite intelligent – and had finally found a way to show it.

“It is hard to be autistic because no one understands me,” she once typed. “People look at me and assume I am dumb because I can’t talk or I act differently than them. I think people get scared with things that look or seem different than them.”

Well said, Carly.

Now, Missy isn’t truly autistic, though many of her symptoms mirror the condition. And I’m certainly not expecting “War and Peace.” But if she can bridge even a little of the gap, even if it’s just enough to tell one similar-looking CD from another, I’ll count that a win.

Reading and writing are amazing gifts. I’m not sure we appreciate just how amazing. Through them, we’ve created a form of telepathy, the ability to send thoughts into the universe and have them received by someone we’ve never met. It’s a sort of community, a network of thought that long predates the first computer.

I want to bring Missy in the door. Maybe we’ll only get as far as the foyer. But she’s surprised me before. And I don’t think she’s done yet.

And however far she goes, I’m ready to lead the cheers.

Give me an “M.”

No, that’s not a typo. Our neighbors to the north recently announced that they’re getting rid of all pennies in circulation. Any spent will get sent off to be melted down; once they’re gone, prices will be adjusted up or down to the nearest five cents to compensate.

“It’s a piece of currency that lacks currency,” Finance Minister Jim Flaherty said during hearings, noting that each one-cent coin costs 1.6 cents to make.

It’s not a bad idea. It’ll save a little in the budget and probably some pocket linings, too.

And if history’s any guide, it will never, ever catch on here.

It’s not that there aren’t people here who want to see the penny go (and occasionally, the dollar bill as well). When I worked the cash register at City News, it was easily the most annoying coin to keep track of. Like most businesses, we scattered the copper-colored coins into a “take a penny, leave a penny” jar to even out the change, effectively rounding prices up or down anyway.

And these days, there aren’t that many people who use cash, period. When even a pizza delivery can be put on a credit card, you know that bills and coins have pretty much fled the battlefield except for vending machines and dancers named Passion Flower.

Even so, trust me on this. Little Lincoln’s got some staying power.

There’s two reasons. The smaller one is that there just isn’t a lot of need. Sure, pennies cost more to make than their face value, and nickels are even worse. But dimes and quarters more than absorb that cost, and coins re-circulate enough times to make that a moot issue, anyway.

The bigger reason? Simple. When it comes to money, Americans are downright stodgy.

You know what I mean.

Remember the jokes and the head-shaking when the redesigned bills came out? (I still think Andrew Jackson looks like he lost a battle with a hair dryer, personally.)

Remember the cold reception to the Sacajawea dollar coin, and the Susan B. Anthony before it?

Frankly, the only alteration to the currency that I can remember drawing a smile was the state quarter series. And most people I knew viewed those as collectibles rather than currency – at least, until their next Diet Coke fix came calling.

But at least we have changed the currency before, if slowly. Now imagine the reaction to withdrawing it.

No one wants to to be the politician that killed Lincoln a second time.

Nonsensical? Maybe. But legitimate. In a weird way, the currency’s become a touchstone, something that rarely changes in a world that changes constantly. It’s familiar enough to inspire trivia or even tasteless jokes. (“Why does Lincoln on the penny face right when all other coins face left? You let a crazy actor get behind you just once and you never get over it .”) It’s even enduring enough to be a minor history project – my sisters used to tape pennies to a sheet of paper, one for each year they could find, going back decades.

Yes, that was one heavy sheet of paper. Thanks for asking.

Maybe touchstones like that aren’t such a bad thing. Think of the orange Broncos jersey that just got put back into circulation. Gaudy? Maybe. But it was also unmistakeably, uniquely us. Lacking it was like missing a tooth. Bringing it back just felt right.

And maybe that’s all the defense a penny coin or a dollar bill needs. It just feels right. When the feeling stops, then maybe we’ll be ready to change our tune.

Or at least to tune our change.

But you wouldn’t want to roll this one. Not the Great Hairball.

I met the Great Hairball in a Garden City museum, in southwestern Kansas. Like most museums, this one tended to accumulate stuff. And like most museum stuff, some of it defied the easy categorization that would get it displayed more often.

So, once in a great while, the museum would do a “Dagwood’s Closet” exhibit – a display of curious or popular items that never seemed to get out at any other time. (Yes, I know, it’s Fibber McGee who had the junk-filled closet. The name stuck anyway.) Anything could turn up and usually did.

But the one thing that invariably turned up, easily the most popular rarely-displayed item, was the Great Hairball. The largest hairball ever retrieved from a cow’s stomach on the IBP kill line.

Sorry. I know some of you are eating breakfast.

The museum’s staff assured me that it had been even bigger before it dried out. They found it weird, even a little disgusting. But they couldn’t deny its popularity. The thing even had its own postcard, with the ball posed next to a ruler to show its true size.

Amazing what we get attached to, isn’t it?

Granted, most of us don’t fixate on a bovine after-dinner comment. But nonetheless, I’d bet that each of us has at least one attachment we can’t fully explain – some object or person or even idea where all we can say is “I like it, OK?”

For Missy the Wonderful, my wife’s developmentally-disabled aunt whom we care for, it’s purses. It doesn’t matter if it’s a big pink duffel bag, a tiny purple handbag, or her iconic red purse of any style – once she has hold of it, it’s her “booky” and will end up 1) Full to bursting and 2) All but inseparable from her.

Why? Well, why did the Lone Ranger carry silver bullets? It’s part of who she is.

My 18-month-old niece Riley has a stuffed duck she’s hauled around since just after birth. It looks like it. More gray than yellow, defiant of washing machines, grungy to a point where even Oscar the Grouch might look at it and say “Meh.”

She won’t be separated from the thing. Not for long. Try it sometime – but bring earplugs.

It starts that young. And I suspect it never really leaves us. At heart, we’re part of a fascinating world, and when we find a piece of it that resonates with us, we cling on. However strange the attachment may seem.

It’s why there’s a doorknob on my desk at work, a tongue-in-cheek award from an old acting company.

It’s why my wife has hung on to the head of a Holly Hobbie ornament since childhood, even after the rest of it vanished one Christmas. We feel like headhunters setting it out each year – but set it out, we do.

They’re objects that carry memory. Or comfort. Or an odd fascination.

And without them, we wouldn’t feel completely “us” for a while.

That’s not a bad thing. Oh, it can be, I suppose. We’ve all run into attachments that hold us back or weigh us down, things we know we should throw away and can’t quite. Objects of the hand or objects of the mind, they may as well be the One Ring for all the power they hold.

But most of the time, it’s more benign. A proof, if you will, that anything can be worthy of love, no matter how small or strange it may seem.

When you come down to it, that’s a very hopeful thought.

Touch the world. Experience it. Let some of it come along for the ride. Have a ball.

Only – not a giant mutant hairball, please?

I’m pretty sure one of those is enough. Really.

Ever since she got her wheels back.

Mind you, Missy doesn’t drive (not that she wouldn’t gleefully try). But Monday is when her bus service got brought back – the large van that takes her to “work,” her program for developmentally disabled adults.

She’s thrilled and rightfully so. It’s a chance to travel with all her friends again, to have a little more independence, to be in a huge vehicle with lots of space. To have her routine back just the way she likes it.

We’re thrilled that she’s thrilled. It’s neat to see her excited, great to see her happy.

And yet …

Well, the morning drive seems just a little quieter than it used to.

Heather and I have been the Official Missy Chauffeurs for about two years now. It’s how we first eased into caring for her before moving in last year, and how she got used to us being around all the time. By now, the takeoff prep is second nature: making sure the shoes are on the right feet, that the coat for the day is heavy or light enough, that a spoon from the morning’s breakfast hasn’t mysteriously migrated into her lunch box, and so on.

But the flight time. That’s where the fun begins.

Most mornings and afternoons, it means Missy the DJ, grabbing a fistful of CDs or tape cassettes and swapping them out through the drive, sometimes at half-song intervals. Oldies rock, Christmas tunes and a cappella groups like the Face Vocal Band get the longest lingers and the loudest volumes. (Ever seen a car vibrate to the tune of “Safety Dance?”)

Some mornings, it’s Missy the Environmental Engineer, adjusting the window from the armrest. Usually this means watching her seal it tight even on a dog-melting summer’s day, but we’re no stranger to the occasional surprise draft from the passenger seat.

More than once, it’s been Missy the Tour Guide, pointing through the windshield at a house Heather used to live in, or the newspaper I work at now, or the next turn we need to take to get to her work. Heather spent a long time wondering why Missy pointed at one particular office building before finally discovering it was the chiropractor that she’d gone to as a girl.

And always, it’s been Missy the Love. Sometimes sassy, sometimes mellow, sometimes ready to “dance” in the car or pat your arm reassuringly.

And now, the dance partner has joined the rest of the party.

Is this what a parent feels when a child goes to school? Or learns to drive? Or takes just one more step out of the house? A little joy, a little regret, mixed with time and bound with memories?

Funny. I’d gotten so used to thinking about Missy’s routines that I hadn’t realized my own. And how they’d come to grow around hers.

But that’s what families do.

And if the last couple of days have shown me anything, it’s how much of a family we have become.

I was there to meet her when she returned the first day. She walked eagerly inside, balancing a bit on me, ready for her tea and her snack, for our hugs and questions, for our reading session later in the day.

It seems we’ve become her routine, too. As much as the bus ever was.

But seeing that smile, hearing that giggle, will never grow routine.

And that’s the best ride of all.

Silly, of course. After all, the Encyclopaedia Britannica had 244 years of history behind it. That’s more than enough to outlast the Disney filmstrips that insisted the word was spelled “E-N-C-Y-C-L-O-P-E-D-I-A.”

But it couldn’t outlast the times. In an age of hyper-digital look-up and research, a $1,395 set of books just didn’t make bottom-line sense anymore. Which is why EB recently announced that the current 32-volume print edition (published in 2010) would be the last.

The thought depresses me.

I understand why they did it. The books weren’t even that big a part of their business these days. A news report estimated that less than 1 percent of Britannica’s sales come from the big, thick, books; the shift to electronic and online editions tipped past the balance point long ago.

But I’m a book person. I always have been.

I don’t mean that I eschew online sources or even (whisper the name) Wikipedia. Far from it. But I’ve always had a passion for physical reference books. Dictionaries, thesauruses, almanacs, Associated Press stylebooks – my wife and I have even sworn that if we ever win the lottery , a full edition of the Oxford English Dictionary will go on the shopping list.

Some of it’s the permanence. My Merriam-Webster isn’t likely to be hit by cybervandals tomorrow or be unreadable if the power goes down. (So long as the flashlight has batteries, anyway.)

Some of it’s the depth of experience you can get. Older editions of the Britannica had articles by Albert Einstein, Harry Houdini and Isaac Asimov, for Pete’s sake. Never mind the unseen watchdogs known as editors, a concept that still seems to elude many online sites.

There’s even a comfort to the heft. When your little sisters are invading your room, after all, you don’t want to be left trying to defend yourself with a DVD.

But for me, that’s all secondary. The real value to a reference book – an honest-to-goodness real, tangible book – is serendipity.

Dip in. Read. Just for fun. No plans, no map.

I love the Internet. And it’s invaluable when I need to track something down. But there’s times when you want to know something, and times when you just want to know.

Which is why, as a kid, I would dip through my folks’ Random House dictionary, swimming through cool words and their origins.

It’s why, as a college student, the AP stylebook became my nighttime pleasure reading, one of the best trivia manuals I had run across at the time.

It’s why my folks grabbed a cheap Encyclopedia Americana at a library book sale, or why I kept getting new World and New York Times almanacs for Christmas every year (one of which even introduced us to this curious search engine called Google). Those weren’t just homework references, they were pastimes.

Knowledge for its own sake. For the sheer joy of it.

For all that we’re in an Information Age, there seems to be less of that somehow.

I hope that survives. Because in the end, that was the real value of the well-bound books with the thistle on the spine: the hope (illusory or not) that you really could know it all, the feeling that you could dive in at any point and come up with something you had never thought about before. Something you had never even thought about thinking before.

The curiosity that leads someone to want to know more.

Not bad for 29 pounds of books, huh?

So thank you, EB. May your physical memories be many and your virtual trials few.

Hail, Britannica. And farewell.