Have you ever turned on the water tap and remembered hours later somewhere else that you forgot to turn it off? Some mess, eh?

Well, it didn’t happen quite that way for me but it’s close enough to tell the story because, after all, senior citizens like to tell stories of their self-made misfortunes. Junior citizens talk about their jobs, their kids and sex. Wanting for anything better to discuss, seniors tend to talk about the senior moments they experience and sometimes they are more than moments.

In my case, it wasn’t the water I forgot to turn off. It was my book subscriptions. Some time ago I joined three book clubs that enticed me with interesting offers. Join now, they said, and they would send me enough free books to challenge my brain cells ---few that there were---for the rest of the year and then some. All I would have to do is buy a certain number of books a year and everybody would be happy, myself, the book publishers and certainly the authors whose egos would be satisfied, knowing that someone was reading the precious words they had either put on paper or sent into the mysterious world of the computer.

Although most of the books I read come from our well stocked and staffed county library system, I decided to join the book clubs anyway, not all at once but at different periods of my life when the giveaway offers arrived. Once in a while they advertised a book that interested me and that I could read leisurely without worrying about returning it to the library at the allotted time and without being fearful that they would send the FBI if I kept it longer than I was supposed to. Jackie Gleason, the comedian, was said to be a speed reader, consuming an entire novel in one night. I am not a slow reader, but I cannot match the Gleason pace, so I figured it would be nice to have a book in my house that I could read whenever the muse moved me and without the chief librarian looking over my shoulder.

The catch to all this is that the book clubs send you monthly literature and with it comes a card that lists some of their hot sellers and a place on the card to check whether you would like them to mail you the books at stated prices plus postage. If you want nothing, you must check that box that says “don’t send.” Do nothing at all and the postman rings more than once to deliver books and books and books.

So during a period from the Christmas shopping season into January (and still counting) the mailman has brought 23 books to my house, five for gifts to the members of my family and one other who are readers, two given to me as gifts, four that I returned unopened to the book club and 12 that are stacked up in my office How this happened I do not know. Perhaps it is like the man who forgot to turn off his water tap. I am flooded with literature, probably because I forgot to turn off those cards they keep sending me with little boxes that say “don’t send.”

Here is a sampling of some of the books that were sent. I have read three and one half of them and it may take the rest of the year to finish, providing I can find a way to stop the leakage from the book clubs’ Hoover Dam or whatever.

Among the uninvited books on the list are “Rin Tin Tin, The Life and The Legend,” by Susan Orlean, the story of the famous movie dog , its successors and owner Lee Duncan who trace back to the silent screen days after World War I; “Zero Day,” by David Baldacci, a fiction about a government superhero who tracks down terrorists by carrying everything in his knapsack except a Sherman tank; ”Kearny’s March,” by Winston Groom, about America’s expansion to the west and its seizure of California from the Mexicans; “The Mormon War,’ By Brandon G. Kinney, an account of the turbulence in which the Mormons were involved in their early days in Missouri; “Betty White, Here We Go Again, My Life in Television,” the actress’ memoirs of five years in television, and “Inferno The World at War, 1939 to 1945,” by Max Hastings, a book that is so fat (729 pages) you can sit on it unless you’re the governor of New Jersey.

There is more but I do not have time to tell. My doorbell is ringing and the mail woman is carrying a big bundle. Oh, boy! The water is still running.