Books & the Long Goodbye

From about 10 years old to 50 years old (my current age) I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time, money, and resources on collecting books.  I imagined there was a time in the future where I would settle down in an old house full of bookshelves or wallpaper the walls with them, stacked and steadied with gravity alone like the monk cells of Skellig Michael.

I think I reached the pinnacle of my literary hoarding some time in my mid-30’s at which time I went through all the different places they were stored and lovingly counted them, taking in the musty smells and reliving memories of where I was when I acquired them.  The number was somewhere in the 900’s and I felt like God near the end of His creation who “saw all that He had made, and it was very good.”

But geez-oh-Pete, getting married, forever moving out of my parent’s habitations (to include their warehouse), and being responsible to transport this library from place to place was daunting.  As a result the magic number of 1000 books was never reached and the library began to shrink.  Each subsequent move took its toll until the most recent one this summer.

The culling process had always been a painful and deeply melancholy experience for me,  but during this last move it was almost a relief.  What remained of my library was literally cut in half with hard decisions being made as to what had to go and what I felt was not yet ready to be released back into the world.  For at least a few weeks HalfPrice Books became a frequent stop for me with boxes and boxes of books flowing forth from the back of my car, the store speakers buzzing with “Aaron, we have your offer ready at the counter.”

It seems at some point my “children” transformed from paper and ink to flesh and blood. My kids have helped me realize there are more important things in life than accumulating material things to bolster my ego (a major motivating factor if I'm honest).  They’ve needed space to grow and flourish and the books have had to give way to that.

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