Heaven

As a young child, I imagined that heaven was a library.  I envisioned a great room redolent with the beautiful, musty smell of pages from ages past, holding every book imaginable, all while retaining the cozy atmosphere of a private library.  My heaven was full of big, squashy, chartreuse-colored armchairs, the kind a small child like myself could just sink into, each with its own little table next to it, and a lamp that provided enough light to read by and painted everything around its dim pool goldenrod.  Also scattered about the room, reaching from old book-ladder to book-ladder were hammocks hung expressly for my reading pleasure.  Ah, to find yourself in a place where, after having lived your own life thoroughly on Earth, you could bury yourself in the worlds of others, take part in every adventure embarked upon this little planet teeming with life in the midst of a nebulous universe.

If you'd asked me what I wanted to be when I grw up at that age, you most likely would have been presented with a list of every possible occupation--"doctor, teacher, waitress, soccer coach, soccer mom (I thought this was a job.  I also thought minivans were cool.), lifeguard, scientist (I imagined myself looking through a telescope at the stars and sighing), writer, racecar driver, restaurant critic, actress, book-editor, hobo...".  As I grew older, the jobs became more specific, but just as varied.  In fourth grade, I planned to be a marine biologist, a botanist scouring the world for natural cures to a botanist scouring the world for natural cures to diseases like cancer, and a discoverer of rare mushrooms.  And then my ambitions became just plain precocious, "I want to be a social anthropologist!  I'll be an adventurer!" I cried at age 12.  "I'm planning to become a public intellectual," I told people at 16.  I wanted to do it all.    A heaven full of books would be the perfect place for me. 

And really, I don't think my idea of heaven was too far off.  because that's what dying means, really--once you die, you know everything.  Whether you believe in Heaven or Nirvana or Shangri-La or not when you're living, you finally find out if you were right.  And if heaven doesn't exist, and you decompose, the particles of You become a new part of the ever-changing universe, just another component in the Law of Conservation.  So if you find that heaven does exist, and if yours is like mine, you join every living thing...with the added bonus of a squashy chair, a hot hearth to warm your feet on, a dim lamp, and a hot cup of tea.  Oh yeah, and a good book.  Lots of them.