Searching for Tolstoy

The other night, in the Absolute Zero boredom of the Outcalt household, my wife asked me, "Do you have a copy of War and Peace?"

"War and Peace? You mean the Tolstoy classic?"

"That's the one. What do you know about Tolstoy?"

"I know he wrote War and Peace," I said. "He was Russian. He also attempted to improve society by eschewing all earthly pleasures. Probably even sex with his old, Russian battle-ax wife."

"Didn't he go nuts at the end?" Becky asked.

I strode to the library to retrieve my giant Mariam-Webster's: Encyclopedia of Literature. "Says here he gave away all of his possessions and then abruptly died a few weeks later. Good thing, I guess, since he didn't have anything to live for."

Minutes later, I'm in the library looking for my dog-eared copy of War and Peace. "Can't you find it?" Becky asks, watching some Olympic ski jumping on the side.

"I know I have a copy," I told her. "It's a paperback I purchased in Durham, North Carolina at that tobacco warehouse that had been converted into a giant bookstore."

"I remember that place," she said. "It was a mess."

"Still is!" After searching for twenty minutes, I gave up. "No War and Peace tonight."

"One of these days," Becky tells me, "You've got to get organized."

I note the piles of Warren G. Harding biographies straddling the floor, the great heaping mounds of manuscripts and uncompleted essays I'm still working on, the unstuffed mailing envelopes waiting to be filled, the many boxes of unpacked books that have been shipped to me by unsuspecting publishers. I'm organized!

But Tolstoy's War and Peace? It's a mystery. And I'll be agitated and unable to rest until I locate that copy!