We truly enjoyed the Women of Distinction award ceremony on Saturday, Aug. 16. The first reason was we were delighted to see Kathy Prinz and Rita Pecora honored; the second was the great presentation. It was a graceful performance piece and the Girl Scouts reading the credits for the women gave a great spectrum of what is being done by local residents.

Volunteering certainly benefits the larger community.

We also loved seeing the Plainview-Old Bethpage Library. As a gentleman attending told his wife, "There is landscaping and lots of parking and the auditorium is great."

The next benefit was the honoring of Rosalie Sandillo, of Locust Valley. She is currently the president of the Friends of the Locust Valley Library.

We attended their recent book sale and found several very special books we had been interested in reading. One was The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver, that our late Bayville editor, Renata Maimone, suggested we read. We never did get to it, and found a copy of the book at the Locust Valley book sale.

As a dedicated watcher of C-SPAN programs we have seen many authors note the books they most respect and The Poisonwood Bible is often on the list. It was serendipitous.

Additionally we found Prodigal Summer, by Ms. Kingsolver, and found out, at the Oyster Bay Health Fair that it is the favorite of Gaye Verdi, executive director of the WaterFront Center. If you read the book you can understand why Gaye would love it.

All we can say is thank you to everyone for enriching our lives. It's just another case of "Everyone is five degrees away from Kevin Bacon!"

And - as we left the Plainview-Old Bethpage Library there was a book sale table. There we found another book we were looking forward to reading, Ken Follet's The Pillars of Faith! And it only cost 25 cents, used. We had to use Elmer's glue to repair the binding - something we consider great fun too. It's a serendipitous world. Thank you everyone. - DFK