The used book store in my town closed last week because the landlord raised the rent. At the last day half-price sale I picked up a Charles Dickens’ which seemed fitting in the soon-to-be orphaned space.

Books were off the shelves. Shelves off the walls. Unsold books were piled on makeshift plywood carts, no longer aligned in elegant alphabetical order. The staff offered cider and tried to be upbeat but I kind of felt like a fringe relative picking through the remains of the empty family home.

Too dramatic? Maybe. But how else can you react when a book store disappears?  The used book store was a fixture on Main Street.  A destination bookstore for fans from out of the area, a rainy day stop for locals and a fitting shelter for your own old books when it was their time to move on.

The staff said the old book business will be folded into another store in a nearby town but they hope to one day return.  Yeah, we know what happens when a good old friend packs up.

Meanwhile, just around the corner the town library closed. For remodeling, said the sign. The librarians promise it will be more jumping than ever when it re-opens. The same library reduced its schedule last year. Regulars get nervous when a library cuts hours, thins staff and puts up a closed sign, if only for three months.

I’m not going to blame any of this on my friends who’ve gone over to the dark side. Kindles, Nooks and e-readers are clearly here to stay and I’ve tried to stop grousing about them, saving my curled lip for landlords who raise the rent in a recession.

Over Christmas I was in a bookstore line when the man behind me held up State of Wonder by Ann Patchett and asked if I knew the book. I said I was waiting for the paperback. He was buying it for his wife, he said, adding that she had breast cancer and loved women authors. Who else would I recommend? I said our book club is wild for Alice Munro. He excused himself and disappeared into the M section.

Ann Patchett has opened up her own independent book store in Nashville. She said she has no interest in living in a city without a bookstore. And who would?Although the used book emporium is gone from our town the independent bookstore with new books thankfully hangs in there.

Last winter in Truckee my daughter and granddaughter and I trudged through a mountain blizzard to a small book store, warm and smelling of hot chocolate. I found an Edith Wharton, my daughter a Bill Bryson and my granddaughter a picture book. Is there a comparable Kindle moment?

If everyone was to eventually give up hard copy books and go electronic our towns would lose their literary center. And what would become of the books themselves?

We have six bookcases in our small two bedroom house. When they fill up and we need to purge we take our books to the hospice thrift store. Or give them to the library for their book sale. Or take them to the late great used book store downtown.

Knowing your books will find a good new home makes it easier to give them up. It would be a sin to throw a book in the trash or put it into a recycling bin. To do so would surely call forth the ghosts of the greats. Emily Dickinson might haunt you, as well she should, and I imagine she can be pretty snappish.

This new concern about our electronic addiction and how we should temper the tweets, take a Facebook fast, is an idea that doesn’t take much prompting for me to friend. Of course, my generation doesn’t need as much encouragement to unplug.

I wear a watch. I read books on paper. I do love my smart phone and would like to find a way to rationalize the purchase of an iPad.  Yet, some people think I’m terribly old fashioned for holding onto my CD collection.

Still, I do understand the seduction of the little screen and how sometimes you need to break free and tune out, turn off, go find a whale.

Especially on a cold bright morning when rain is around the corner and soon to obscure the ocean. And when the word has been out for weeks that the whales are back and you’re just getting around to driving out to the beach.

Every winter just knowing that the whales are nearby makes me happy.  I imagine their huge gray graceful selves doing a dark underwater ballet as they silently slide along our coast on the way to Mexico’s warm spa.

You can go on the internet and see whales frolicking in the ocean. You can listen to the distinct clucking and squealing noises peculiar to the gray whale and the song of the humpback.  But a laptop doesn’t deliver the up-close smell of the ocean or the light touch  of the winter sun.

The wind was whipping around the rocky bluffs of Bodega Head, giving the gulls and pelicans a giddy ride as a small shivering group of hopefuls steadied our binoculars and waited.

The winter ocean is pretty thrilling when it’s bringing in a storm and the water goes from calm to churning. But were those white caps or whale spouts? Was that a shadow of a cloud or a giant’s dark back?

Our computer obsession is not good for our health we are told. Experts worry that Facebook makes people feel more alienated than connected. We need to take a break from all those beeps and alerts. I agree. How can a person daydream if they’re always plugged in?

We’ve heard these moderation lectures before. In the days before computers took over multi-taskers were encouraged to develop a healthy balance between work and play.  Remember the days of take-time-to-smell-the-flowers?

I’m kind of old school media. I read newspapers, listen to the radio. We have a landline phone in the house. I give journals to people for birthday presents. I write down dates and appointments on a calendar in the hall.

In the book The Information Diet, author Clay Johnson talks about our unhealthy habit of gobbling information and news. With just about everything you want available on the internet, he urges people to be more selective about what we take in and to employ more conscious consumption.

Certainly we all know people who are addicted to their computers. Yet just by looking at Facebook it’s apparent from all the photos of real sunsets and dreamy snowfalls that people do occasionally get away from their gadgets.

We didn’t see any whales that morning. That was okay. Last summer I saw a bunch of humpbacks in the Atlantic from a whale boat out of Gloucester Massachusetts. Those east coast whales came so close to the boat we could wink at each other.

I know our whales are out there, somewhere between us and the horizon. Moby Dick doesn’t have to be available on demand. We have our ways of interacting.

The name of the big pointy rock in Mendocino County that sits along the Russian River and looks at highway 101 is having a name change. She will no longer be Squaw Rock, which she’s been known as for 50 years, but Frog Woman Rock or in Pomo dialect, Maatha kawao qhabe.

The reason? Some consider the word squaw a derogatory term for Native American women. And also because the Pomo Indians who settled in this part of Northern California and know the true mythology behind the landmark say Frog Woman is her rightful name.

I love this story. It took me back to a time when we got into discussions over the appropriateness and fairness of words. When we attempted to do the right thing by carefully thinking before we spoke. Of course there’s been some grousing over the name change with people saying it’s a dumb thing to worry about in these awful times. And while one might wish the state of California would use its genius to concentrate on creating jobs and saving schools, I was happy to see that some people are still sensitive to how we use our words. Especially now when the national conversation has pretty much devolved into grunts, accusations, lies and insensitive, hateful name-calling.

The idea behind correcting the language is to improve, update and adjust it to reflect current sensibilities and proper usage. It is not meant to annoy people although it almost always does. Some words don’t keep up with the times. Like back when we agreed that not everyone who runs a meeting is a male so it’s silly to call us all chairmen. And not everyone who fight fires is a fireman and not everyone who catches salmon in the Pacific is a fisherman.

Other words were actually hurtful and needed to be changed out of respect. Retarded became developmentally disabled. Deaf became hearing impaired. A person with a same-sex partner preferred to be called gay, not homosexual. People with certain diseases asked to be called survivors instead of victims.

Changing the name of a big old boulder sitting in the river in Mendocino County will not have the same far-reaching affect on the language but it means something to historians and local Native American tribes. In renaming Squaw Rock the California State Historical Commission said the word squaw has a condescending image and has been used as a racial epithet.

The stories connected to the landmark are pretty good. It was dubbed Squaw Rock because according to one legend a young Indian woman, left by her Indian chief boyfriend for another, climbed to the top of the cliff, saw her former betrothed with his new woman below, picked up a big rock and jumped, killing herself and them.

Less operatic but no less violent, the Frog Woman legend holds that a creature half frog and half woman lived in a cave in the rock and devoured men after having her way with them.

Some people will probably continue to call it Squaw and others, in the interests of fairness and accuracy, will try out Frog Woman and eventually get used to it. These things take time. I sometimes forget and refer to flight attendants as stewardesses. And I’m never 100 percent sure whether to refer to someone as African-American or black until I ask.

Language is a living evolving thing. It needs to be cared for. Not abused. Now will someone please tell that to those loose tongues in Washington?