A few months ago, we put new carpets in our house. This meant moving things from one room to another in a loosely cadenced fashion, since the carpet installers have never come up with a way of levitating furniture to pull out the old carpet and push the new one into place. We did not do the really heavy lifting. But we had to get cabinets emptied out so a strong man can handle the large pieces without breaking them or himself.
I should explain that we have lived in our house for 38 years. During that time, the accretion of books and records and dishes and ornaments greatly exceeded the discarding of the old to make room for the new.
All of this got started when a broken toilet flooded most of the main floor. The changeover required stripping the underlayers and left us with the living room carpet that was not wet but was rotten after almost four decades.
The most difficult of all of the rooms was the den, which has become my office—one whole wall of bookshelves, two large bookcases, two small bookcases, a rack for the encyclopedias (circa 1975), a desk composed of four file cabinets and a large panel door, the television table, the hand-built chest for the hi-fi, a large couch, and my reading chair.
The bookshelves remained in their places; everything else had to be moved. That included the 500 LP records that have not been played in a decade, since we began to replace them with CDs, of which there are more than 600. It also included about 300 books, most of which I have not yet read and some of which I surely never will.
The books are a polyglot mix. They include college yearbooks, sets of texts for Great Books series, Diana’s gardening books, my boating books, two shelves of philosophy left from my first wife’s collection, compendia of American and English literature, an almost complete set of Pogo, 30 or 40 histories, the gleanings from the discount counter at Barnes and Noble, two dozen copies of the Federal Register , and a constantly growing stack of soft-cover books.
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