some things can't be accounted for.

Jeff picks up his favorite book, Accounting for Dummies, and asks me: “Why do they keep sending this to us?”

”Your book?” I ask to clarify. “I think we bought it at Barnes & Noble a few years ago. Nobody sent it to us.”

”Yeah,” he says, gesturing with the book in question for emphasis, “but it seems like they send it every day. Why is that?”

I’m not sure why Accounting for Dummies has remained, for quite a few years, a book that Jeff is most likely to pick up, but it has. A few years ago, probably about six years ago, Jeff decided he would take courses in the accounting track at Anne Arundel Community College. He got a few sessions into course 101 (whatever it was called,) before deciding that he’d “fallen behind” and would re-enroll next semester. Falling behind, translated into my viewpoint, meant that he’d lost his car in the vast parking lot options at AACC at least twice (requiring my rescue,) and he’d rarely arrived for class on time (as one had to locate the classroom each and every session.) He “studied” by looking at his class materials and inscribing a phrase, such as “Assets = Liability + Capital” twenty or so times, at assorted oblique angles, on a piece of notebook paper, but little else. We were clearly beyond the point of no return.

Nevertheless, he has retained the notion that he’d like to study accounting, and—to that end—stares diligently at the table of contents in Accounting for Dummies, almost daily. So whatever it is he’s asking me about this morning represents a new kink in the hose.

”They keep sending us this,” he insists, patting his book. “I don’t get it.”

I realize that trying to make sense of the “reality” from which he’s speaking is going to be a fruitless endeavor. “Do you like this book?” I ask.

”Do you move this around?” he asks, a little more on a page that corresponds to one I recognize. “Sometimes it’s here, sometimes it’s over there...”

I say “I think you just read it a lot, and sometimes carry it around without even noticing. Everyone does that.” His face still shows utter perplexity, but he’s willing to buy that story, for now.

Later he wonders, aloud, whether he’d be any good at stock market investing. I show him his books on that very subject. “Oh yeah, those,” he says.