1) Last night, walking home from the subway after 11 PM, Before I’d even left Amory Street I could hear loud singing coming from a great distance away: “Country ROAAAAAADS, take me HOOOOOOOME . . . “ I said to me myself “Please . . . please let that be at the Midway and not at Doyle’s.” But no, it was coming from Doyle’s, so I felt I must drift in for an extremely, extremely rare nightcap.
1a) Several staff came up to talk to me as I sat at a table in the center room, watching the occasional conga line of costumed revelers pass by. (In the words of the late Anna Russell, “I’m not making this up, you know!”) One elderly lady on the staff sat with me awhile with her own drink so we could talk. And I got to see Young Mr. Burke briefly as I squeezed out when I finished my drink.
2) I’d been warned that if I wanted a T-shirt that I’d better get in line in the parking lot by 10:30 in the morning, and I did - and I was not the first person there. One wily old lady - with shoulder length hair that may have had a more than a touch of henna in it - tried to insinuate herself in the front of the line by asking the question “Does anybawdy heah remembah when it wz just one room? Theah oughta be three lines: one room, two rooms, three rooms!” And I thought to myself “I’ve been coming here twice a week for 16 years and I’ve never seen YOU here! Who the hell are you anyway?” I gather I am not the only one frustrated by these “last-timers” who have rushed back, smiling through tears to close the place down, making their first trip back in 20 years. But, as Ruth Draper taught us in “The Italian Lesson,” “And even if we think those things we don’t say them!”
3) To my horror, the time has now come to sweep The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up through my library. What you see represents perhaps only a half to two-thirds of my total library, mostly encompassing Old Hollywood, European history, British, French, and Russian nobility; reference, Civil War, disasters (Titanic, Lusitania, Hindenburg, Cocoanut Grove), cookbooks, art and art history, and homosexuals of the mid-century. Still to come: fiction, US Presidents and First Ladies, American history, mysteries, genealogy, travel, humor, random, and three shelves of books related to etiquette.
3a) I have always - always - placed a high value on having an extensive library. When I was in first grade I learned to read instantly. My parents had a lot of books, and made sure that my sister I did, too. Books are civilization, knowledge, intelligence, Truth. But more than a few times parking this half of the library on the floor I found myself looking askance. “When did I last reread that book? Did I even read that? Is this here only because it was Daddy’s?” The creative tension between my fierce defense of a large library vs. both the Konmari requirement to keep only things that create joyous feelings and not unreasonable space constraints already feels challenging. But this is where wisdom I received from my subconscious comes into play . . .
3b) . . . THE DREAM OF THE BLACK ZEN BUDDHIST BASKETBALL PLAYERS. My freshman year of college I dreamt of three black Zen Buddhist basketball players on a team with three white hippies. They were leaving the third quarter of a game, and one of the hippies was blessing out the head Zen Buddhist. And the head Zen Buddhist turned to him and said “Our attitudes can accept our changes, but our changes cannot accept our attitudes.” What a powerful message to receive from a dream! And that is exactly where I find myself with my beloved library today.