I have finally joined Lee in the annual chore of spring cleaning. I have mostly avoided the task this year, finding other “important” things to do while she moved from room to room, taking each object and dusting, washing, polishing, or otherwise cleaning it. (I have stepped in when it’s time to move a large object or lift something heavy, but that doesn’t really count.)
Because this year is our 25th in this 97-year-old house, formerly owned by Dr. Sargent and his wife, Natalie, and later by “Buzzy” Watts and his family, the spring cleaning is more comprehensive than usual. We celebrated our 39th wedding anniversary last Friday, and I decided that the time had come for me step up and do my share of the work.
The year we moved here, I was busy writing, editing, and publishing The Telegram, which also meant delivering the paper, cleaning the office, and hauling away the garbage. Fortunately, my children were old enough to help with the move, which included carrying boxes and boxes of books from the House on the Cliff to our new home in downtown Bristol. In the process, my neatly arranged bookshelves with authors alphabetically sequenced became something of a hodgepodge. For 25 years, the books remained in disarray, made even more confusing by the additions we have purchased through the years.
Saturday and Sunday, therefore, were dedicated to taking the books down, dusting them (a lot of dust can accumulate on books that have not been touched in 25 years, and those we had been reading still needed cleaning), separating the fiction from the non-fiction, and putting the authors back into alphabetical order. The bookshelves themselves came down to be washed, and the walls behind cleaned, to prepare for a new and nicely arranged stack of books.
In the process, I discovered books I had forgotten, books I had never gotten around to reading, and books that I want to read again. One of them was Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum which I had received from Telegram graphic designer Patrick Keating, and I was reminded that the author had a personal library of 30,000 books, many of which he had never had a chance to read. When he died in 2016, his collection went to his alma mater, the Università di Bologna, where he taught beginning in 1975, and where he was professor emeritus from 2008 until his death. There is a video of him walking through his home library:
While I was sorting books, Lee was going through old papers and came across one of my newspaper columns from about 20 years ago, concerning the decline in customer service — a decline that has continued in the ensuring years. Today, technology has advanced to the degree that reaching a “real person” for customer assistance is nearly impossible when wanting to correct something like FedEx routinely leaving our packages at our neighbor’s home and having the company fail to acknowledge that the problem exists. When I reported on the FedEx website that the package had been delivered to the wrong address, I received the reply: “Research for tracking number 637635491088 is complete: our records indicate your package was delivered on 3/8/2023 11:16:01 AM.”
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