Books

I’m lying on the bed, tired and achy, the cat on my lap. I moved a lot of books today. Big heavy boxes. In the cold and dim light of our storage facility, a big building two or three miles to the west, by the Brown Bear Car Wash. It’s a huge bin. Every time the corrugated aluminum door goes clattering up, I’m overwhelmed by the mountain of boxes and miscellaneous odds and ends forgotten over time, wine rack and clarinet and chess table. Framed prints of my father’s aerospace illustrations, landing modules and orbital satellite for harvesting the sun. But boxes, mainly. Big ones. All full of books. Books I’ve bought over the years. I wonder how many of them I’ve actually read. It’s too cold at the storage facility to sort through them. There are no amenities there, just the overhead lights, which are timed. R had to walk around a little to get them to come on again. They have sensors that detect body movement. Once I get the boxes home, I can take my time making hard decisions on which to keep, which to sell. I need to get rid of most of them. The storage facility is too expensive. It’s an agonizing process. Even though I’m now 75 and the likelihood of ever having enough time to read these books is nil, it’s hard parting with them. They all represent a certain phase of my life, shifting tastes, abrupt pursuits, great enlightenments, comforts in my despair, evolutions of intellect, my dalliances with Middle English, my flirtations with physics, my discovery of Dada, poetry in old journals when print media was still a primary feature of our culture, along with critical thinking. A few of the books belong to R. Her tastes run so closely parallel to mine that we often can’t tell which books belong to who. Some were a gift from her father. Occasionally, an old notebook will surface. I found one today with poetry I’d written in 1973. It wasn’t half bad. Even a photo album. Photos of me with my brother and dad circa the mid-80s, both gone now. I managed to get five boxes filled and ready to take to the used book store. What they don’t buy I’ll take to Goodwill. And if Goodwill won’t take them, I don’t know. I will sit with them. Feel the weight of them. And sigh.