Every Sunday I try to fill up this sorry old Goodwill tote with stuff that needs to leave my house Monday morning. That’s the gig. I’ve been doing in for months now, and I’m really not sure where the stuff is still coming from. I’m digging deeper I guess. This week the evenings are cooler, so I plucked hoodies thinking the hoodie-less might appreciate a cheap hoodie buy. My family is not hoodie-deprived. In fact we are apparently great fans of the hoodie, or somehow our growing light has been undetected and we are an unharnessed hoodie breeding ground. Either way, I’m happy to share the love of the hat-sweatshirt combo meal.
Also, books. Because here’s something I never would have thought I’d ever possibly feel about books: so many of them, I just don’t need. Once you go digital, easily replaced books lose their appeal. I never thought I’d say this. I’ve hauled shelves of books with me to every home, shouldering bursting boxes full of them up and downstairs, hoarding them in piles like water and bags of rice for the end of times.
I suppose now that I’m becoming less primal about my books I need to also drop my Hopworth Books v. Friends Doctrine to be congruent, and it might even be time to forgive an old friend from a two decade old grudge. It’s a hard one to let go of, however, mostly because of my genius abilities in the grudge-shouldering department.
My friend Brian was in the despair-stricken lows of a possible break-up with his beautiful, compulsive liar of a boyfriend. Brian survived a precarious “Should I Stay or Should I Go” two-week tenderloin from my ill-begotten living room couch. Just about the time it seemed as though it might be a comfortable arrangement, I woke early one morning to the sound of a strange kitchen or roofing disaster, only to find Brian lost his way when looking for the toilet, was trying balancing his weight by pressing one hand against the shaky folding bookshelf in my hallway while leaning into the longest. loudest, drunken-sleepwalking piss I have ever seen an adult man, woman or animal take.
Have you ever dropped a paperback in the bathtub, think for a moment it can be saved, only to watch it bloom into a Godzilla as it dries before your eyes? Multiply that by 30 or so, stir in a bottle of the deer spray hunters use to attract big bucks and you have the sad state of the trashbag he filled later that day and took to the street. My first copy of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. A signed Carolyn Forché. I loved Brian but that was damn near unforgivable.
Until now, I guess. I guess it’s time, because the books he ruined, had they survived, would have been taken to Goodwill tomorrow. Well, probably not the Forché. But still. Books, whatever. They’re just paper and dust. Put them in the blue tote. Bygones!