OLD MEN, OLD BOOKS
Today I drove to the Black Mountain McDonalds and sat with my octogenarian friends. I felt at home and was warmed by their company.
Afterward I stopped by my Swannanoa storage locker and continued the Sisyphean task of sorting through my 70 milk cartons of books, books that have been in storage for 30 years which I have been unable to look at all of that time. Some books are in such poor shape or are of such little interest that I could put them in the trash on the way home. Some I am going to give to Jamie whose entire Marshall store of thousands of used books was washed away by tropical storm Helene, some books may go to someone else, but the hardest part of this sorting was to glance through underlined, my underlining, what I had thought was important, in book after book. Some of these books were friends, some had woken me up and sent me in new directions, all of them were the record of my feeling my way through life. I had absorbed something from all of them. They were all to some degree part of me.
So that is what made this sorting process so hard. Every shelf of my apartment is already filled with the books I have already not been able to part with and give to Jamie. Where there aren’t books there are things that I have found beautiful. There is no space left.
And yet I can’t part with some of these old friends either. They are not simply ideas or words on a page, for me they have warmth, they touch me in a way that enlivens me, they are not abstract, they touch me in some deep visceral way. For this reason I linger over each one before putting it into one pile or another and for that reason these 70 boxes are going to take forever to sort through. And when done what will I do with these books I cannot part with, where will I put them, will I store them again for however long I have, at which point they will be tossed without emotion?
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 
Books books books – especially for a retired academic retired teacher! I’ve checked with Worldcat.org to see if my library or another library has the book, and decide whether to trash it or add it to my local or other library. Do you ever do that?