Fog Lifted Early

Loyal readers, apologies for the drought of posts of late.  Busy times for the blog proprietress.  This weekend was spent cleaning, dismantling and discarding old stuff; purchasing, assembling, and organizing new stuff; riding utility elevators, climbing stairs, bargaining, finagling, cursing, celebrating and so forth. Hard work for soft hands accustomed only to the gentle demands of the mouse and keyboard! At any rate, while sorting through my stuff yesterday, I stumbled upon this poem. It's from Nobel Laureate Czeslaw Milosz's Collected Poems 1931-1987 and it's called "Gift":

A day so happy.

Fog lifted early, I worked in the garden.

Hummingbirds were stopping over honeysuckle flowers.

There was no

thing on earth I wanted to possess.

I knew no-one worth my envying him. 

Whatever evil I suffered, I forgot,

To think that once I was the same man did not embarrass me.

In my body I felt no pain.

When straightening up, I saw the blue sea and sails. 

No More Empty Bowl

I made a quick jaunt into Chinatown today to do something about Mr. Big's bowl, which had been looking very vacant these last few days since the demise of my goldish.  ("It's so depressing," said Leah. "It's like a testament to your failure!") Pictured on the left: A symbolic success, in the form of some very verdant bamboo and some very attractive multi-colored rocks. Long live the bowl's new inhabitant! 

Rituals of Resale

I liked this story in today's New York Times about the "book-scavenging semipros who help the city's best-known used-book store keep its shelves stocked." The description of the bookselling line ("NYU students, genteel booklovers moving to smaller apartments, frugal cleaners-outers and a fair number of down-and-out book scavengers") is pretty accurate. Personally,  every time I go to the Strand with a ripping paper bag of books to sell back, I feel a little like Chip in The Corrections:

He ran out of money on a Friday in July. Facing a weekend with Julia, who could cost him fifteen dollars at a cinema refreshments counter, he purged the Marxists from his bookshelves and took them to the Strand in two extremely heavy bags.  The books were in their original jackets and had an aggregate list price of $3,900.  A buyer at the Strand appraised them casually and delivered his verdict: "Sixty-five."