Paring down

My uncle Liam and his wife are transportable people. Their homes, now free of children, are easily packed up--light on stuff. I envy them the space they seem to have, even in homes small enough for two--homes with no closets or drawers. But it takes time to let go of things. Spalding Gray's obituary, for instance. Now brown--you have to work at it to read it. Same with Bukowski's. Something about obituaries appeals to me. Yesterday I tossed Spalding, but kept Bukowski, and not because I prefer Bukowski but because in the precarious caluclation of value only I can apply, I have other more precious Spalding items in other boxes.

I have three fat pine cones. One of them I knicked from Epidauros when I traveled there shortly after Jim died in Athens. It's a fairly well-traveled tourist site now, and there are signs that tell you not to take anything when you leave. So I left the stones, but took a pine cone. Sadly, I don't know which of the three pine cones is THE pine cone, and so I'm having trouble reducing the mass.

Books are the worst of it. I'm never really going to read all those history of religion books again. The small-press poetry that didn't appeal to me the first time I read it. The enormous stack of Granta volumes. Who needs the OED in the internet age? I'm never going to crack the history of science books. I'm never going to read Whitehead again--I mean, seriously. But I can't get rid of Whitehead; I pored over his convoluted universe for too many months, with Jim and without him. So I drew a line: books of synthesis and analysis I'm giving away. The originals I'll keep. 10 boxes in the back of my car, heading to the library this afternoon. My shelves have air on them, and it's a better feeling than I thought it would be. I thought I'd feel loss.

You get why a person might shave her head.