Purging the Paper

Over a hundred books have moved on to greener pastures this week. I have about two hundred more that are destined to be packed up for Goodwill when I acquire more boxes. Quite a few are earmarked for handing down to other people's children. Three boxes full, with any luck, will sell on Half.com. I'd say the lucky ones that have earned a permanent home here on the homestead number around five hundred. That seems like a lot, but what remains can be comfortably shelved, and these are books that I know will be read or referenced. (This does not take into account kids' books, which will be dealt with as they outgrow them. However, I do think I will utilize the "one in, one out" rule- anytime they buy or receive a new book, one gets put into the donation box.)

There are about two dozen of my father's books that I am having a hard time emotionally letting go of, and I have decided that I will reread them (or, for some, guiltily read for the first time) so that they may have a proper send-off into the world. And these will truly be released into the wild: I plan to register them on Book Crossing so I can monitor their travels. The hope is that my father's notes and cross-references will bring meaning to some other avid reader, some other wandering soul.

Which brings me to today's decluttering/ emotional overhaul crisis:

Like my father before me, I read with a pencil and paper. In an effort to capture those things I find meaningful, useful, or just interesting, I write down quotes, thoughts, and cross-references as I read. Where my father and I differ is that he would generally write in the margins, whereas I cannot bring myself to deface a book. What this means in the long term is that I have piles and piles of paper and notebooks. Whenever my cleaning brings them to my attention, I tend to read them over, and I still find the bulk of it amusing, or touching, or whatever. So back into the box or drawer or book it goes.

Every once in a while I make an effort to sort through all these bits of paper, putting them into binders or files. What that means is I have a lot of binders and files. (There is a file in my file cabinet labelled, in my father's hand, "Papers". I kid you not. This file is specifically quotes from books I read in high school or just random things I wrote down, and they have survived the cleaning out of my childhood bedroom, two moves, and a basement flooding.)

What to do with these fragments? The first step was to locate the two boot-size shoeboxes (bootboxes) that I keep all my high school letters in. Back in the early 90s, there were no "free minutes" or "fave 5", and long-distance ran a dime every sixty seconds, more if you had urgent mid-day gossip to share. To survive those never-ending summers, and avoid the wrath incurred by $150 phone bills, my friends and I resorted to good old pen and paper. And cringeworthy as it may well be, we were damn funny. Over the years I have gone through these letters and discarded those that were boring or from people I don't particularly care for or about anymore. From people still on the "good" list, I kept only the very best of the best. And still: two good size boxes.

We had lots to say. So much, in fact, that I also had to keep the envelopes, as we would often think of things after the letters were sealed, and hastily scrawled them on the outside.

This morning I went through them one last time. I read through maybe three, looked at the pile, and thought, no way. I do not have time to read all these. And into the recycling bag they went.

So easy! So liberating!
Why didn't I do this before?

And now I have two more empty boxes. As I come across the scattered ghosts of books past, I'll toss them into these boxes, and every day I'll post two or three or ten. This plan has multiple benefits:

1. The paper gets slowly thrown away;



2. The thoughts get documented for future use;



3. Perhaps someone else will enjoy them as well;



4. I now feel obliged to log in and daily and write something, anything.



5. These pieces of me will be there for my kids to access, to help shape their understanding of who I am and how I think, without the future burden of having to get rid all these bits of sentimental flotsam.

Today's quote? I believe it was the copy for a Guess jeans ad. I found it emblazoned multiple times on the envelopes. A tribute to the embarassing, but ultimately empowering, aspects of high school memories:

Walk away when you must.

Walk the goddess walk.

( April 5th: I found this quote today in one of my binders. It is
actually from a Calvin Klein ad, 1992. In case you were really, really
wondering.)

Look, Look, My Heart is an Open Book

Spring is here, and I am spring cleaning with a vengeance.

To begin, I am decluttering. I figure it is easier to deep clean with less stuff in a room. I also do not do things halfway.

Zen house, here I come.

Now things get complicated. I am determined to keep as much as possible out of the landfill. So, we have boxes for recycling. We have boxes for Goodwill. We have boxes of baby things to be passed on to those with babies. Slowly the mess has begun to subside and I can begin to breathe again.

Our hallway is clear. The living room now takes only two minutes to clean at the end of the day. The children are resigned to tidying up their own rooms, and I luxuriate in a cup of tea before bedtime, in the twenty minutes that used to be dedicated to daily pick-up.

Friends, I can avoid the books no longer.
Oh, the books.

I have so many. They line shelves in our living room, dining room, kitchen, bedrooms, upstairs, downstairs. There is a stack on my desk and a stack by my bed. My husband cannot understand why it is so hard for me to let go when I pitched things from every other part of the house with determination and glee. I've read them all already. They are collecting dust. I've not opened many of them in months, years. Why not cast them out?

They are old friends. They are pages in my book. They are bricks in my foundation. Some I have seen every day that I can remember, are such a part of my surroundings that I dread the hole they will leave in my life. A great quantity of them belonged to my father; now that my father is gone, they are my anchors, my conscience. I can see, in my mind's eye, my father reading this very edition of the Tao te Ching. These are his notes in Walden and On the Duty of Civil Disobedience. His dog-eared copy of Catch-22. In this overstuffed binder we have every short story, almost, of J.D. Salinger, that my father sought out and photocopied, from the library archive copies of the magazines that originally published them.

Then there are my copies of the Trixie Belden series, my favorites from middle-schoolhood. I am waiting for my three-year-old to hurry up and learn to read so she can enjoy them as much as I did. (My boys find Trixie to be too girly.) All the Ramonas and Henry Huggins and Bunniculas, the Chronicles of Narnia, the Choose Your Own Adventures. I know my kids have their own, newer copies, but I love having the very books I read as a child, my name scrawled inside the front cover.

Not to mention the complete works of: Thomas Hardy. Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman. F Scott Fitzgerald. Doestoevsky. Salinger, in multiple editions and languages. Austen. Bradbury. It goes on and on.

Oh, my gosh. The Alice in Wonderland books. Jabberwocky. Different editions, different illustrators. Biographies of Lewis Carroll. Coffee-table books of his photography. Scholarly interpretations. Jigsaw books and pop-ups.

My children's books. Board books that my oldest passed down to his brother, who in turn bestowed onto his sister.

This is my heart on display- yes, in my living room, in my bedroom, in my kids' rooms, in my kitchen, upstairs, downstairs, waiting to be seen, opened, loved.

And yet.

Sometimes enough is enough.

Perhaps rather than giving my children the gift of me as a child, trapped in aging, yellowing, dusty pages, perhaps give the gift of me now.

So I am weeding my book garden. Early childhood parenting books were easy enough to let go of; my youngest is a preschooler now, although we still call her the baby. I passed them and the board books for the littlest readers onto a friend blessed with a newborn. I posted all my Gaimans and Pratchetts on Half.com at 99 cents apiece; these were happily snatched up by fellow sci-fi and fantasy geeks, and I am happy to ship them out to be enjoyed. My classics, I reason, are available at the library, and so I drove them off to Goodwill today. (I am still sitting on my beautiful Everyman's Library editions. Some things take time.)

Now I am left with the books that are a very real part of me, and it hurts. Every time a Lewis Carroll or a Salinger sells, I gamely pack it up, but something deep inside whispers, "There must be a better way!" But I know I do not really need twenty copies of Through the Looking Glass, or even five copies of Raise High the Roof Beam Carpenters, and we need the money, and I tell myself I am sending it off to start a new life. This grieving process allows me to revisit myself at an earlier time, to remember who I was, to remember my father, to take this bits and pieces of who we were, what makes us good, and send it out into the world. Hopefully, in some ridiculously small and trite way, I make it a better place.

I think I am writing to preserve these parts of me. To physically take stock of who I once was and what aspects of that person I want to include in how I see myself today. To help me assess my present self. To find room to breathe.

There is a quote swimming around in my mind, but I cannot for the life of me recall where I read it. I'll post it nonetheless, as closely as I remember it, and when I find its source I will post that as well.

To own more books than one can perchance read, is nothing less than the soul aspiring to greatness.

I Blog, Therefore I Am

Testing the waters. Boldly going where everyone else in the world, including my ten year old son, has gone before.

Gentlemen, perhaps the only reason I regard myself as an intelligent man is that I've never in my whole life been able to begin or to finish anything.
-Fyodor Dostoevsky
Notes from Underground

"Begin at the beginning," the king said, "and go on till you come to the end: then stop."
-Lewis Carroll
Alice in Wonderland