Collecting Without Limits? Living or Dying?

Tiny sculptures of me and Dave, by artist Marguerite Howland. He wears his VT hat; I clutch a book.

The “big questions” don’t come up in daily life very often. For Dave and me, learning about his defective heart in 2006 could have changed everything: After two heart attacks, and with limited blood flow to that critical organ, it looked like we had an answer to what would end his days. His heart. Truly ironic, for a man who gave love so completely and with such deep pleasure.

However, Dave’s decision to keep his heart condition a secret from both his family and his friends freed us to ignore the threat at home. His doctor monitored his weight and the fluids that his ailing system tried to hold onto, treating him with a daily dose of “water pills” that kept him at home for the first seven hours of each day, but freed him to ride the roads in comfort in the other hours. And boy, did we have a lot of roads to ride!

Mostly we drove to used bookstores in northern New England — although a trip to visit Dave’s relatives in New Haven, Connecticut, or mine near New York City meant diving into stores there, too. Dave’s track record in New Haven shops had been stellar: Once he walked in as a small collection was bring pretty much ignored, from the personal library of author John Hersey (I’d read his book A Bell for Adano and Hiroshima; to Dave, the quintessential Hersey book was The Wall). The shop, raising money for college scholarships, didn’t have a…