More Books in the House

The Christmas wrapping is in the compost and the presents are now in a stack next to my bed.  They are almost all books, added to the hundred or so others piled up between my side of the bed and the window.  I've been home from work for a couple of days, and during this time have acquired even more.  I went to a book store on Wednesday, looking for a copy of "Love in the Time of Cholera" for a book club that I may or may not make it to, but they didn't have it in stock so I got it nearly instantly downloaded to my Kindle instead (when two day delivery is not fast enough).  Others have come up in other discussions for another book club, another I heard about from a New Yorker article, and I ordered all of them.

We were walking the dog the other day and I asked whichever children were accompanying me (it's not that I have that many, but they are all at home at the moment) how many books they thought we have in our house.  Sarah estimated ten thousand, which seemed to me to be a reasonable guess - almost every room has bookcases, and they are insufficient to hold all the books, which are also in boxes and stacks and spread across the floor where stacks collapsed.  When Caroline was in kindergarten, she was recruited to participate in the kindergarten cohort of the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, a U.S. Department of Education-sponsored study that included periodic in person assessments, teacher questionnaires, and telephone interviews of parents.  One question they always asked me was how many children's books we had in our home; I remember estimating eight hundred the first time I was asked and two thousand years later -- the interviewers always seemed surprised; not skeptical, just surprised.

Most of those have been cleared out now - they went to neighbors, to neighborhood preschools and to Morningside Elementary and to book drives for other schools and maybe some of them to Goodwill -- but we all are accumulators of books, and the result is apparent in almost every room.  I have been thinking about this recently not because I am concerned about the clutter (which I should be more than I am) but because I now know that it is hopeless that I will every get everything read that I intend to read.

Years ago (I don't even remember when) I used to keep track of the books I read on 3 by 5 inch index cards.  After that there was a notebook; I don't know what happened to either that or the 3 by 5 cards.  Then there was nothing for a long time (which may have had something to do with having children) and then there was Goodreads.  I liked being able to easily add a book to the list of books I want to read, and then move them, one at a time, from "Want to Read" to "Currently Reading" to "Read." And then there are the reading challenges, setting goals for how many books you plan to read, and periodically checking how you're doing.  One recent year I set a goal of fifty, and came no where near it.  This year's goal was 26, but I have been reading more (I have periodically sworn off watching television news, this year, and have consciously tried to read instead) and I am now at forty books read in 2017, and may finish that book on the Kindle by the end of the year (or not).

But here's the calculation I just did.  Let's say, for purposes of discussion, that I have another thirty years of reading ahead of me (which would get me to an age older than both of my long-lived parents) - and I managed to read an average of fifty books a year for those thirty years.  That is only fifteen hundred books, for the rest of my life - and I just got eleven books for Christmas (okay, so one was a book on hydroponic gardening that is more of a reference book and probably won't be read cover-to-cover) and since Christmas I've bought five more, including the one I am currently reading on my Kindle.

I really am fine with getting rid of most of them, after I've read them - I regularly pass them along to someone else, or leave them in a neighborhood Little Free Library, or drop them off in a Better World Books donation box.  Our house is not full to the rafters with books we've read (although some of them we have) but with books we mean to read.  So I guess this means I should stop writing, right now, and start reading - because I can't really do too much about the thirty years, at this point, but maybe I can increase the fifty.  Fifteen hundred is just not a big enough number.

Good Neighbors

I haven't written much here this year in part because for the last several months I have mostly been out of town for work.  During the time I was gone, I lived in a short term rental, furnished apartment in a building where I did not know a single person.  There were other people living there for sure -- I saw their Amazon packages, piled up in the corridor -- but I rarely saw anyone.  It's not that the neighborhood wasn't a "real neighborhood" -- on Halloween, there was a huge neighborhood festival and entire families in costume out trick-or-treating in the early evening, and occupants of single family homes were set up in the front yard in costume with vats of candy to hand out -- but my building, no.

Now I am back, and getting caught up on what's going on here. We have houses under construction on both ends of the street but several houses that were on the market are now under contract (at least according to the signs in the yards).

So we are expecting several new neighbors soon, unless the plan is to knock down the house and start over. 

The moving truck followed by the home theater installation people and Xfinity have been at one house (the "Under Contract" sign has been down there for a while), and there's now a car in the driveway, so we figure we do have new neighbors, but at least as of yesterday, the neighbors on either side of them haven't met them yet.  I will try to get brownies made today and take them over.  Wessyngton women are having our more-or-less annual festive winter seasonal event later this week, and we'll need to make sure to pass along the invitation to that, too.

This is what neighbors are supposed to do -- stop by when new people move in, not with the expectation that we will all end up being best of friends (although of course that might happen), but that if I'm out of town you might be willing to pick up my mail and my newspaper for a couple of days, or help me find my lost dog.  This does not appear to be the norm everywhere, I know - there was the terribly depressing post I saw during the summer, written by an elderly lady in Southern California who tried hard to get to know her neighbors, but no one reciprocated, (and no, I don't usually read The Federalist - I don't even remember how I came across this) and there are the regular reports that fewer people know their neighbors now than in the past.  (And of course, sometimes it just doesn't work because some people are terrible people.)  That's not our local ecology, here, but I know it is that way in many neighborhoods.  A lot of us here try hard to be good neighbors.

When I was in the apartment, there was an electronic lock on my door that didn't require a key.  One time when I was on an early morning flight back to Atlanta I realized after I got to the airport that I hadn't locked the door when I left.  The normal thing would be to ask a neighbor to lock it, but I did not know one person in the building - so I had to ask the property management company to send someone by to lock the door. 

But I have to go now.  I need to make some brownies.