Shelves That Are Empty

I’d tried the other day around 4:15PM to look for books.  I pulled back a cardboard box or two.  Pull wha's under this one.  Inspect this plastic Tupperware containers one by one.  In the end most of what I saw was one or two books of note, books which I’d gladly liberate from the basement dungeon and put them on the book shelf walls in the ground floor bedroom.   But there wasn’t much else to be found.   It was getting dark.  One of the bulbs was out.  Another day, then

This afternoon I returned.   In the far northeast corner there are seven our eight cardboard records.  Vinyl is heavy and fragile.  I realized as I moved one box and then another that all the books were in the plastic tubs at the very bottom of the floor.  I must have thought to put them on the ground just in case this basement flooded, though it never has.  And as I moved one liquor box full of records and then another I could see all the books I was looking for. 

Much of what I found were books from undergrad.  Rousseau’s “Social Contract,”  collections of Tolstoy short stories, a text book on oceanography.   The guest room that has served as one or another child’s bedroom over the years, has two large shelves that are empty and began to fill them now, one by one.  I thought of all the books that are stored over in Beijing that I won’t get to see any time soon.  Even if I had them, we won't be able to put them anywhere. 

Later that night I got to button down my younger one so I could read to her.  We are approaching the ending of “Anna Karenina.”  But the focus was on Levin and Kitty who had just had a baby.  Tolstoy manages once again to perfectly render the male version, certainly of the frantic time before one welcomes a new born and how time, moves so differently and one's rhythms are so completely at odds with the rest of the world’ around you.  I remember those moments when time stood still. 

Monday, 11/25/19