In a corner of the blue room, I keep Will’s smaller toys in a chest by my closet, next to a table on which I pile books to be shelved. Last night, I found Will imperturbably riffling through the drawers, even though a stack of books had collapsed in a heap in front of it. I was worried that the books might have fallen on him, but there was no sign of that. The heap is still there, and I have to do something about it when I’m through here.

I wish that I could think of something to do with the books on the floor other than stacking them again. Evidently, I’m not wishing hard enough, because nothing comes to mind. At some point, I will be carrying books out of the apartment, presumably in shopping bags, and carrying them uptown to the new storage unit. But which books?

I’m not discouraged, though, because I’ve just come from the old storage unit, where, on the third try, I managed to open the Readerware file, which permitted me to register the titles in two piles, the donation pile and the uptown (keeper) pile. In about half an hour, I processed nearly forty books. The MiFi connection was a tad slow, so I had plenty of time to think about what I was doing. I had the advantage of a completely clear shelf: this year, the Christmas decorations stayed in the apartment. (I know myself well enough to foresee how really unpleasant a holiday-time schlep from  (and then back to) the uptown storage unit, at the tip of Manhattan, would be.) As soon as this staging area fills up, I’ll go downstairs and buy some boxes, and, when there are enough boxes to warrant the expense, I’ll arrange for a van to take them away, either to HousingWorks or to the new unit. It feels great to have begun the project at last.

At some point, I’ll lure an accomplice to the downtown unit, to read the ISBNs of older books, published before the advent of the bar code (I’ve still got quite a few of those), and the titles of books that don’t have numbers at all. This accomplice may have to be Kathleen herself, as a lot of the books are hers.

All this, after having a squamous cell burned off my scalp and then delivering a housewarming present. The present was for our friend who lives surrounded by museum-quality treasures, and I’d have been at wit’s end trying to think of something that wouldn’t be positively unwelcome if he hadn’t mentioned a predicament that owes to his not having explored the world of online shopping. There being few-to-no amply-stocked record stores anymore (we still call them that), he was at a loss to replace a recording of Der Fliegender Holländer that he had come particularly to dislike. It was one of those late Karajan recordings, ruined by the conductor’s delusions of expertise in the sound-engineering department. I went to Arkivmusic and selected three almost certainly better ones, led by Otto Klemperer, James Levine, and Sir Georg Solti. Kathleen wrapped them up nicely and I left them with my friend’s doorman on this morning’s rounds. When I got home, there was a message of thanks on the machine. “I’m pleased as punch!” he said. We’ll see him tomorrow night, at a Museum do, and perhaps he’ll have had a chance to do a bit of listening.

***

Why didn’t I read Edna O’Brien when I was young? Because I was put off by wild Irish pagans. They interfered with my study of English as it is spoken at the source. And they had, I thought, nothing to teach me about the world, except how backward Ireland was. The only good thing about Ireland, in those days, was that it made me feel lucky to live in America.

Oh, well. I’ve lived long enough to change my tune. When Country Girl, O’Brien’s autobiography, appeared earlier this year, I noticed that no one was carrying her novels, except of course Amazon. So I ordered a few, and I’ve been enjoying The Country Girl quite a lot, even to the point of deriving no small pleasure from discerning the passages that would have displeased my greener ear, and laughing at my fussy old self. Colm Tóibín has taught me to hear music in what once seemed to be gruff silence. There are also genuine wonders. For meshing all layers of narrative meaning, the following can’t be beat. After  a Halloween party, the girls file into chapel “to pray for the Holy Souls.”

We prayed for the souls in Purgatory. I thought of Mama and cried for a while. I put my face in my hands so that the girls next to me would think that I was praying or meditating or something. I was trying to recall how many sins she had committed from the time she was at Confession to the time she died. I knew that we had been given too much change in one of the shops and I said I’d bring it back.

“You will not, they have more than that out of us,” she said, and she put the change into the cracked jug on the pantry shelf. And she had told a lie too. Mrs Stevens from the cottages came up to borrow the donkey and Mama said the donkey was in the bog with Hickey; when all the time the donkey was above in the kitchen garden asleep under the pear tree with its knees bent. I saw him there because Mama had sent me to look for the black hen who was laying out. Every year the black hen laid out and hatched her chickens in the ditch. It was a miracle to see her wander back to the hen-house with a clutch of lovely little furry yellow chickens behind her. When I had stopped crying my face was red and my eyelids hot.

I was fairly knocked down by the presumption of the girl’s imagining that she might know what those sins were — that’s Ireland for you, I suppose — but even more impressive was the authorial trick of thereby introducing a couple of picturesque anecdotes into the story.

How nice it would be to stretch out in my chair out on the balcony and finish the novel! But I’ve a pile of books to attend to.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 19th, 2013 at 4:34 pm.