Day 1: Books

Yesterday, I was at a bar with a few friends, celebrating the end of Mardi Gras, and when we got to discussing Lent and this idea of giving away a thing a day, one of the guys asked me what I thought I would give away first. I honestly hadn't thought about it. I'd spent so much time mulling over things I could give away without too much pain, that I hadn't really decided on any one thing to start with. And somehow, the first thing seems the most important. It seems symbolic, like everything after that will be as superficial or as meaningful as it is. So this morning, as I stood in the corner of my room and surveyed the vast landscape of unused things, I decided that the first to go had to be the thing closest to my heart.

In graduate school, I took an education class called "Teaching Writing." In name, the class was meant more for teachers than for writers themselves, but the professor emphasized the importance of writing to understand and experience what our students would experience. I wrote a number of different things in the class, but the one I remember best, and the one I submitted for our class anthology, was a piece about Katrina. Now what you have to understand is that, every time I try to write about when Katrina hit, I cry. Not a tear-stained cheek, but a good, honest cry. More than five years later, that event and those feelings still have the power they had in 2005. They're not provoked very often anymore--New Orleans looks a lot like its old self in many ways--but writing about it brings everything back, and I usually abandon Katrina stories a few paragraphs in when I realize that I can't do it justice. I can't make you feel what I felt, and for that matter, I have a hard time letting myself feel what I felt again. The only successful piece I've ever done on Katrina required no punctuation, no thoughts, no feelings, no tears. I think I would call it a poem, but it was more like arranging a bouquet: a sad, but hopeful bouquet of the things I yearned for most when the city flooded and I was stuck at school in Virginia: miles away from my family, miles away from my home, miles away from my books.



I have always thought of my books as a necessary part of me, something painfully space-consuming and heavy but necessary to move around with me to every new house I live in, a commentary on my life and personality. I have kept them for comfort of their presence, old friends on tired old shelves. So for day one of this Lenten purging, I am giving away books. Not all of them, of course, just the ones that, if I'm being honest with myself (and that can be hard), I will never actually read or re-read. It is a little like spring cleaning my Facebook friend list: who do I never talk to? Who was I never really friends to begin with? Who did I meet but never really hit it off with? Surprisingly, each book in the box made the next book easier to take off the shelf. Now, with a box full of estranged old friends ready to be donated to the library, I feel good. Not just relieved, but like I just finished a good run...and want to run a little more.