sold and shipped

Were ever books in this humor sold? Were ever books in in this humor given?

You know me.

I sold my first used book on Amazon.com Marketplace yesterday. It was A Basic Course in American Sign Language (ABC in ASL). I sold it for $8.74. Damn me and my penchant for wacky number.

I should have sold it higher, maybe $18.74, especially since the buyer seemed so desperate for it. He did ask to have it mailed to him first class.

Now, the book that I had used for half a year in Chabot College during high school, and saved for four years afterwards, is en route to Florida.

At that moment, when I realized that this book was going across the United States, so very far away from me, I knew I will probably never see it again. Even if I missed it, I will not be able to see again what I wrote. I wrote some things on the last chapter to explain that some of the signs (involving countries and continents) were obsolete.

What's interesting was that the buyer was a reverend, Christ's own spokesperson. I wondered about not sending this book to him, because I was vaguely fearful that he was going to try to learn sign language and convert a whole gathering of Deaf people to Jesus and have them come to his congregation. (Time was, long ago, parisioners tend to shun the Deaf because being deaf meant being unable to hear "the word of God" and to hear "the music of God" and so they were fundamentally "unsaveable." Recently, they realized that this was wrong, and that all people are worthy of being saved.) But alas, I held to my sense of business dealing and mailed the book. Damn the Protestant business ethics instilled in me!

What's also interesting was that he was bad at English. He said, "I will pay the different." "Difference" is the correct word. Can not even a preacher spell correctly? He promised to pay the extra shipping cost since I was only supposed to send it by priority mail, not express. I'm worrying if he'll pay the difference.

Sometimes I wonder: Will he sell it after he is done with it? Maybe it'll go crisscrossing the United States--around the world, even!--and will I ever see it again? Maybe 30 years later. Maybe like Montgomery Burns' Bobo that he loved so much and lost so many years ago. Maybe I'll suddenly see it on some scraps, some yard sale in Seattle that I happen to walk by and I'll say, "There's my writing. There it is. Mercy, what a world of coincidence this is!"

Maybe I'll have a heart attack right there, when I'm age 112. Maybe it'll be burned because of heresy. Who knows?

The thing of this was, it was the first book I ever had that started me on my way to learning American Sign Language. This was before I learned the Vista Way. Ohlone and Vista, the two major colleges that taught Signing Naturally, were too far away. I was still in high school. In the land of suburbia, you cannot go far without a sturdy car.

So I had to learn ASL by going to the nearest community college that I could get to by bus and still have time to do my homework for high school. They used ABC, not Signing Naturally. I have sentimental values attached, and it was worth more than 8.74 that I charged for it . . .

Then again, Signing Naturally offers a better way of learning. ABC was useless. It was disorganized lump of pictures with words underneath. An index helps me find what sign to look for, but did not help me learn how to formulate a sentence with the correct grammatical structure. Yes, there were examples, but there was no way I could use them and practice them. The teacher was also hearing, and he talked in class.

With Signing Naturally, I had a teacher that was Deaf. That made all the difference.