“As a recent retiree, I am taking the opportunity to turn my attention to some of the many vignettes of life that by dint of career and family have been neglected these many years. In that context, I am returning with this letter an overdue item (by my count, approximately 17,480 days overdue as of this writing)… it’s quite late, and I’m quite sorry!”

— So Simon, who is now 62, in a letter sent along with the Bob Dylan album (“Self Portrait”) he’d borrowed as an eighth-grader. Yes, he mailed it back to the library 48 years late. Also:

Simon also included a $175 check — “a tithe, if you will,” he said, or about 10% of what the dime-a-day late fee in effect in July 1973 would have added up to.

Also, the library, which incidentally in Cleveland, Ohio, right near where I grew up (and So Simon currently lives in San Francisco, where I write this right now), declined to cash the check:

Sara Philips, manager of the University Heights, Ohio, branch of Heights Libraries, said the library no longer collects late fees.

“We’re grateful that Mr. Simon returned the record,” she said on the library’s website. “I said we can now call it even.”

Just a great little story.