So here it is, April 10. The day after my mother's birthday. She would've been 102. Good thing she's not here anymore to see how un-revolutionary Americans have gotten despite her (French) insistence that there needs to be blood in the streets. She was really in bad shape of course, even with those feisty genes only made it to 97; her older sister on the other hand was at almost full capacity and died at home in her sleep, halfway through a philosophy book she was reading. She had just turned 101.

I was talking to my sister-in-law just back from a trip up north to finalize going through her parents' boxes and boxes of collections, in the facility where her mother was before she died. Paperwork mostly and photographic documentation of his life because he was a bigwig at Stanford. Gonna ship most of it back here mostly because it's a Thing—Wall of certificates because he was head of his department and so forth.

I told her about how I am not comparing at all, but for me yesterday was kind of bittersweet. I realized that since I still have access to my old man's Gmail account I could technically make myself two separate YouTube entities thus avoiding excess cross pollination by the algorithm: one for music especially, one for politics and recipes. Well, I'm busy doing that, when I have to acknowledge that there are upwards of 49,000 emails sitting there stored/archived whatever. And more coming in all the time, mostly from progressive organizations. I spend five minutes being conflicted, and then being bored by some of the ancient correspondence. Him and his friend discussing a movie from 2002. It occurs to me that, in the same way I toss flyers addressed to him into the recycle bin, none of this has any bearing on my life. So I begin the process of deletion and unsubscribing. It's understandable that it can't exactly be instantaneous so, yes, a little window pops up saying 'this may take some time'. I got nothing but—I can just go about my business. Return half an hour later and it's all gone. All of it.

If you make a plan, as I did with the dual YouTube thing and you stumble across something unintended, you can choose to just deal with it right then. Much in the same way, my sister-in-law and brother went up to this distant location, requiring four days and a couple of flights which my brother hates, it is a bit of a commitment to stop procrastination, but also in her case it was also not wanting to pay for storage.

In my situation as I told her, not to compare or anything, but I have been sitting on the guilt that the room where the old man died is in still pretty much the same condition it was four years ago. I did extract a bunch of books because after all, I was dealing with the ones outside the room and it seemed silly not to. That whole business of setting up a little library out front had led me to facing The Culling of the Books. And that in turn led to mysterious people taking over my little library, dedicated to a guy who obsessively collected books. Turns out, Book Wrangling is exponentially more complicated than I had anticipated.

For me, I think also politics-avoidance morphed into my own weird couple a months of perusing a clever book and then with a tiny bit of research discovering that there were 10 in a series and so going to used-book sites and spending a few bucks to obtain them. I like doing this. It has precedence from the '90s when I finished collecting all 11 Upton Sinclair Lanny Budd volumes of the same edition. They all line up neatly. I read all of them, about 4 million words. Seriously. And I enjoyed it.

Liking and enjoying.

At present, I have also a comforting and quite recently started spreadsheet which has seven tabs, labeled with three different cherished authors, and then hardbound/paperback/non-fiction/fiction, and all of the books in the back room, now including the ones that I fished out of the death room. (I call this excel file "libery" in honor of Elizabeth Taylor. Little joke me and the old man used to have.)

At some point, this will expand beyond just the back room where these reside. Upton Sinclair may get his own tab! Edgar Rice Burroughs even. Like an episode of masochistic barfing though, I expect I'm pretty much done with the spasmodic buying part for now. Once in a while something will come along that excites. I have at least one in the pipeline that's brand new. That's going into the Libery. For some inexplicable reason even at full price it feels good. Supporting writers!

My phone conversation with my sister-in-law has ended because my brother is insisting that she come look at the dusty carousel of slides that he just opened. Of course she can't say no. To him anyway. I'm OK with that. I got other fish to fry. It's definitely time for me to go hop on the Water Rower.

Don't know what's going on with me that I suddenly connect some dots and find myself opening the door, marching right smack over to the rower and hauling it out from the death room where it's been stored. Bringing it out to the hallway, setting it upright just outside the bathroom on the wall. I pry off the mental barnacles stubbornly blocking the way of getting some exercise (osteoporosis yay). I can just yell at my phone and it will time me for whatever I tell it, and the fiddly part of keeping track of how much I've done evaporates. I set it for 10 minutes. Over time it can be more. I can yell at my phone to play some music, too. I can row to music.

So I'm gonna go do that. I could come back. Ruminate some more.

Or not.

*****

That the hands of the sisters Death and Night, incessantly  
 softly wash again, and ever again, this soil'd world
—Reconciliation, Walt Whitman

Extract from Dona Nobis Pacem
—Ralph Vaughan Williams