I wrote her about the mess
I've created around here. Someone is
coming in to work with me this morning, and our main task will be finding a
place for all the things I've taken off shelves, particularly the boxes of
books to give away. I also have dozens
of reading journals and binders. But in
spite of my mantra "Pretend that you're normal! Pretend that you're normal!" I still choose to write to people like the mother whose little girl
I used to baby sit for who was in my dream last night, friends Javier and I are
meeting tomorrow at Le Olivier and then to see Do You Hear a Waltz, My Best Friend in
Fifth Grade (who just sent a message about seeing Joe Allen, the restaurant where
Jonathan treated us to dinner, on TV with Leslie Stahl, Nathan Hale and Stockard
Channing), and of course my sponsor! I do what
interests and engages me rather than what I should do. I furnish my mind and feed my soul, but my
house suffers, as would anyone entering it now.
They'd worry!
My sponsor mentioned personal letters, and I know I will NEVER give
mine away. If my son chooses, he
can bury them with me--although I'll probably be cremated if I can stand the
heat. Jutta, the German friend I saw in
Switzerland in September was my penpan in 1963, and I still keep all her
letters. I have letters (not all of them
from Jutta) that go from Stratford Road
in Columbia, South Carolina, to Hayes, Kansas, to several different addresses in California, to Tonga, Spain,
Algeria. They've followed me, and now
they show me my life's itinerary, but Jutta's letters are illustrated too!
I have three more garden
books to give away, and I really need to think about which books should be
donated to CCSF (so I've contacted Sirous/Cyrus M. and Erika Delacorte of CCSF)
and which to the public library or just Good Will! But I'd better not think too much!
I listed four more books I thought I was giving away:
The American Desk Encyclopedia because I can look up things online as they
change.
Speaking of Reading even though its written by Nadine Rosenthal,
a colleague and then decided that I mgiht actually be able to read it now that I'm retired. So I stopped in the tracks of my e-mail lines and put at a distance from the give-away box. I also told her I was giving away Deepak Chopra's The Path to
Love because I thought it was probably too touchy-feely, but then I looked inside and saw that it's a hollowed-out
book. You can put things inside and only
New Age burglars will found them! So I decided to keep it or give it away to someone with things to hide! I also started to list Japan in Transition, a book I
picked up when I helped give an ESL methodology workshop in Tokyo back in 1978. But I might hold on to that because of the period!
Here's a dilemma that
requires re-shelving: I group my books
according to category. For example, I
have a whole bookshelf on plays. I
have/had another bookshelf on novels, alphabetized by author, but since the bookshelf
remaining is deeper, I've got to move bigger, "wider" books to that
bookshelf, which means moving the novels, which aren't as deep (in size, mind you) to a different space--and a very big one. That's going to take a lot of
doing.
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