I want to get rid of this bookcase with pull-down desk within this next year. It was full; the little bears sat in front of books as the little doll figures above still do, but now the bears have nothing behind them. I have made some progress. However, most of what is left on the shelves I want to keep for awhile longer. That means culling the hall bookcase and the den assortment to make room for these.
I have some books that I am keeping because of emotional attachment. They were gifts from my sisters or in the case of a Peanuts book from my high school best friend.
Holly Hobbie was popular from about the mid-60’s to the mid-seventies. I still love the pictures in these little books. I sometimes display the Christmas one on a table along with my other decorations.
The Apples of Gold contains pithy sayings, paragraphs of wisdom centered around the fruit of the Spirit. My older sister gave me this when I graduated from high school and inscribed the event inside the cover.
I may have glanced at it back then, but as I perused it today, I decided to look through it a little bit each day this summer. The advice makes more sense to a 65-year-old than an 18-year-old I’m sure. Here is an item from Meekness: “We see things not as they are, but as we are”. No way a teen-ager could really grasp the truth of this saying. It takes experience through the years to appreciate how subjective our outlook really is. Or perhaps it could be interpreted if we want to see things in a positive way, we need to be positive.
Our past makes up part of who we are. It creates our perspective and colors our viewpoint. Among these books I found a lined-paper composition book with notes from Bill Roorbach’s Writing Life Stories. What a good book! Besides my reading notes, I had scribbled the writing exercises he prescribed. Here is one of my compositions that in its own way talks about seeing, about perspective.
The People in the Floor Other than for the obvious purpose, how could one productively use time spent on the toilet? Sort thru relationships, solve financial problems, plan the day or week ahead are possibilities. My thoughts never manage to turn in those directions. I blame the people in the floor. Not the whole floor, really, just the small rectangle in front of the blue rug. That’s my focus while sitting there, straight ahead and down to the swirling shades of gray. They make quite a diverse populace. Human shapes dominate reinforcing my anthropomorphic bias, but some apparitions obviously belong to other branches of the animal kingdom: the jaunty whale, the long-beaked water bird on the wing tucked into a crease of the menacing dinosaur’s jaw. How can a whale of great tonnage be jaunty? It seems unlikely, but his playful eye says he is. Over time others hidden in the larger figures make themselves known as I dissect smaller and smaller canvases for my imagination. I notice the floppy-eared dachshund and the pointy-eared almost-squirrel-faced fur-ball rodent months after the others. Broadening and narrowing perspectives add to the group. I almost miss the jug-eared man who lives in the pouffed gray bangs of the old gypsy lady with her dangling disc earring. Indeed, after the initial discovery, I lose him for awhile because I forget his address. He is a sub-basement kind of guy, going unnoticed for the most part. If I had such huge ears, I probably would want to fade into the background, too. Odd juxtaposing exists in this under-foot world: a homely club-footed angel chasing the beautiful blonde, the beauty’s filmy chiffon stole billowing out as she rides the back of the Chinese dragon, the dragon’s fierce visage threatening the jut-jawed curly-haired matronly face ahead. It is a world of ambiguity and imperfections. Is that a broad-faced aborigine with a choppy hair cut or a pointy-nosed big-mouthed woman whose cupcake hat squashes flat the fringe of hair framing her ugly face? Contemplating my choices, I am startled to see the slash of the mouth become a screwed-up teary eye for the roly-poly-faced pouty boy who encompasses more footage than my original tight frame. What a crybaby he is! I should disown him and shift back to the native man and the unattractive woman, but it is too late. Now that he has caught my attention, he can’t be ignored. I may miss my imaginary bathroom population when I move in a few years to the retirement community condo. Some of the floor inhabitants pop out so sharply surely the new owner will see them. But maybe not. They exist on the floor, but more in the mind, and thus peering at them requires looking beyond the obvious. I do not tell others of the people in the floor. Revealing them would reveal too much of me. A bathroom after all is a private place. The ancient flowing-bearded, cone-hatted sorcerer in the middle floor tile wisely concurs.
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