Neither my companion nor I have family. Mine are dead. Hers are too busy or too elsewhere. So our Christmas is empty of anything but each other. For the next three months we will be in a continuing crisis of people and events that could (unwillingly on our part) break our home apart entirely. This crisis has left us both in a state of chronic fatigue and has abraded the thin veneer of normality we display to the world over top of our respective illnesses, mental in my case, physical in hers. So...Merry Christmas. At least in a pro-forma way. Four sets of white Christmas lights in two blue and two red bottles decorate my Buddhist shrine. My local lama has our Center host an official event with a vegetarian potluck. I couldnt make it, unfortunately. The luxury of not having two home health aides, three regular nurses, two case managers, a podiatrist, a medical transportation driver, a diabetic shoe fitter, and the landlord completely out of our home, and unlikely either to phone us, show up at our door as a part of their job, or hang out in our parking lot while we stumble out as a caravan to another of the bi-weekly medical appointments; that luxury is too rare and too precious for us to spend any other way than either in deep and healing sleep or staring into space listening to only the rough gurgle of the oxygen concentrator. I am normally holed up in my den. But I did make a public appearance of sorts in my local newspaper as a representative of the growing burden of home health care for Baby Boomers. It wasnt very prepossessing; just a photograph of me having my naked back dried off by my aide after my shower. It took place in my den, which was on one side of the wide angle photograph, and my bathroom, which was on the other. Two very nice ladies, the reporter and the photographer, did the interview. And they, of course, fitted in perfectly with the troupe of the Medical Cirque de Soleil that is traipsing through here constantly. I have given myself a personal Christmas gift: a fairy tale Library, of at least 2,500 books, all on my I-pad, all free save for labor of assembly (the best part of the gift these days), and all books that I would likely be interested in reading, even if my short life doesnt let me get around to it. To quote Prime Minister W.E. Gladstone (just which ministry under what Queen of the United Kingdom and Empress of India is irrelevant at the moment; information like that is what libraries are for): “I will now exhibit to my reader the practical effect of such arrangement, in bringing great numbers of books within easy reach. Let each projection be three feet long, twelve inches deep (ample for two faces of octavos), and nine feet high, so that the upper shelf can be reached by the aid of a wooden stool of two steps not more than twenty inches high, and portable without the least effort in a single hand. I will suppose the wall space available to be eight feet, and the projections, three in number, with end pieces need only jut out three feet five, while narrow strips of bookcase will run up the wall between the projections. Under these conditions, the bookcases thus described will carry above 2,000 octavo volumes. And a library forty feet long and twenty feet broad, amply lighted, having some portion of the centre fitted with very low bookcases suited to serve for some of the uses of tables, will receive on the floor from 18,000 to 20,000 volumes of all sizes, without losing the appearance of a room or assuming that of a warehouse, and while leaving portions of space available near the windows for purposes of study.” W. E. Gladstone. “On Books and the Housing of Them.” Thus we have improved on the 19th Century by putting the above 2,000 volumes into a space 7x9x3/8, but perhaps not so much we might think. Im sorry I had to leave you so long with Mr. Gladstone, who is, admittedly something of a windbag and a stuffed shirt. Even the 19th Century, stuffy and windy as it was, thought so. But I had to make Christmas dinner for myself and my companion--three lamb chops with mint jelly and eight Pilsbury Grands Blueberry Biscuits, hot chocolate or sweet China Black tea to follow. Satisfying enough and far less trouble than the Norman Rockwell painting (Its SO real! The holiday dinner looks good enough to eat and the religious devotion of the grace before meals looks SO sincere!). In addition, I regret to report that I have left home weight scales behind by breaking across the 300 lb. barrier. I may never know my true weight but in a doctors office again. So I really dont need Norman Rockwells Christmas dinner. I might not even need the Hot Chocolate. I was given an Encyclopedia Brittanica by my indulgent parents at the age of eight, some 54 years ago, when the last word in technological progress was IBMs ball driven Selectric typewriter, and a mainframe computer of air conditioned room size had, perhaps, 256k total memory. This gift created my dream of The Perfect Library. The Britannica, at least in things non-fictional, prided itself on seeking out only the best authorities to contribute articles and there was literally nothing in its 24 octavo volumes that was not of the highest interest to me. So I read it hour upon hour for the next 10 years, and returned to it regularly for several more decades. That is, when I was not re-reading my favorite book of fiction, The Count Of Monte Cristo, lost in the fantasy of being a suave, perfectly dressed, 8 year old, a dead shot with a dueling pistol, with a command of seven languages, a stunningly beautiful Turkish woman slave, and on a mission of overwhelming vengeance. Afterward, I read exhaustingly in many very good libraries: Ohio State, University of Michigan, State of Ohio, New York Public, Brooklyn Public, and to my everlasting pride in my own town, the Columbus Public Library, one of the jewels of this multiply jeweled and under appreciated city. I also perused several quite adequate ones such as University of New Mexico, Ohio University in Athens, and the University of West Virginia. Up until I was 40, and had to stop living on student loans to get a real job, I read and read and read and read. But the drawback of every one of these libraries was that the vast majority of the books in them were of no interest to anyone whatever. They stayed on the same shelves in perpetuity. So in order to read and read and read, I had to search and search and search and search for something worth reading. The walking of mile upon mile of library shelves probably contributed to the relatively good shape of my heart and lungs today, but it was a real bore and a great frustration to someone used to 24 octavo volumes with every page of interest close at hand. Thus the dream: a real, if smallish, library where all the books would interest me even if I never got to read most of them. It would never have the sweet smell of thousands of foxing cheap paper file cards deteriorating in the search drawers or the pleasant odor of mildewing buckram, or sometimes leather, bookbindings. And, underneath it all the very faintest hints of wheat based library paste and horse hoove based mucilage glue touching memories all the way back to my first day in kindergarten. And oh, the brittle crackle of the original, clear, Scotch tape as its glue loosened and a temporary repair 20 years old disintegrated. So now I have the dream fulfilled, but the virtual world is dry and airless and a nuisance. So the photographs below, subject to your approval, may stand as the basis for the library. It is an old house, older than the present moment by 50-70 years. We can call it the Gutenberg House, for reasons we will explore presently. It resides somewhere along about the 44th parallel in the upper right corner of the United States. A beautiful Victorian mansion, in a temperate summer climate very near large water: the Connecticut side of Long Island Sound or, perhaps, Rochester, New York along Lake Ontario. Built by the very well-to-do in the 1880s and reaching its full bloom of culture and sophistication somewhere around 1906. That year is the spiritual center of my library, with the past and the future in books radiating out from it. You can sit in the beautiful velvet chairs and luxuriate in book after book after book, or take a break for tea at your writing desk at one corner of the room where your favorite of the recently invented fountain pens lies still eager to write after a full two decades of your correspondence in the past. And if you need to stretch your legs, the beautiful, small tropical conservatory, at the other end of the library, awaits.......
Posted on: Fri, 26 Dec 2014 01:34:12 +0000
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