The 30-lb package of carillon monographs and sheet music and CDs and the almost-complete Klok en Klepel that I so lovingly assembled over the course of several days at the WCF Congress, squandering many Euros on knowing that I would never find these items in the US, and struggling with twice across many blocks in hot weather barely able to carry the weight, arrived.
And at least half of it was gone.
On top of the sorry-looking pile was a paperback book about the Old Testament that I had not purchased.
Perhaps I should not have let the package remain at the Daly City post office for over a week, but it was hardly possible to make it there earlier. Are my carillon books and magazines and CDs still there? Or at some central USPS processing office? Who in the world would find Dutch literature on the history of the carillon so morally repugnant that they would send me a morally repugnant message of their own -- in the form of an interpretation of the Old Testament from Southern Evangelical Seminary?
I waited years to find these items and fully intended to use them for my dissertation writing. Now I will have to wait years (certainly after I've started my writing) to buy them again. Unbelievable.
Some zealous Christian (an American one, I might add, looking at the imprint of this "gift" of a book) may fail to understand his/her disappointing reward in the afterlife for efforts such as these. Should I feel sorry for myself or for the perpetrator of this misdeed? Where do I find the energy to practice carillon this evening after this hoax of a betrayal by a total stranger? All that music I was going to learn, all that knowledge I was hoping to synthesize... gone. Senselessly.
One can hardly imagine a more absurd fate for carillon books.
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