Sometimes I have trouble letting go of things, so I am practicing with stuff like old travel guides and technical literature. Since I am offloading a bunch of old books, I’ve been going through them one by one. I keep turning up all sorts of things tucked inside and in between the stacks. Lots of cards that people have given me over the years. Photographs.
Like a archeological dig, there are many levels.
There’s the pictures in books level. I tend to dog-ear book corners instead of using a bookmarker, but when I do use a bookmarker it is generally not a standard one. That turned up a couple of surprises from my trip to Italy a million years ago. Some pictures of my dog Pupatee. A lot of postcards.
On the card level, I found a ton of old Christmas cards. It is hard to throw away those photo cards! I have also found several cards I completely understand saving.
This one, from my friend Robin:
Actually, a lot of them are from Robin.
This one, too, and if it doesn’t get me right on the express to Hell I don’t know what would:
Then there’s the book level itself: I have three copies of “Le Petit Prince,” including one stamped with the name of my High School. What’s the statute of limitations on unintentional theft? I assume it was unintentional. It WAS. I was a lot of things in High School. A thief is not one of them.
I was intending to give up my Dad’s old set of Child Craft books, but when I leafed through them, I saw the Daniel Boone story that was one of my earliest reading memories and I just couldn’t. I put them all back on the shelf. That is a lot of shelf space. I may have to revisit that.
The 10 year old technical books and decades worth of travel guides are gone. Anything that I don’t intend to read again. Gone. Anything I might read again that is available in the public domain in an e-book. Gone. I have gone from 8 shelves packed double rowed, to 3 shelves that are only part full. It feels good. Lonely though.
Books have been my lifelong friends. I hate to see them leave.