Purging

Hello!  I have adult bookshelves!  That’s not as dirty as it sounds, promise.  It just means that in my new fit of cleaning my room that’s happening this summer, I finally managed to clean off my bookshelves and store books that I haven’t cracked open in, oh, a good seven years or so.  Now my shelves are filled with things like my Shakespeare anthology, Jane Eyre, Dubliners, Atonement and other books for…adults, I guess?  My God, am I really an adult?  That doesn’t feel right.  I totally still feel 12, like all the time.  That’s why I kept Betsy-Tacy, Daisy Fay and the Miracle Man, and A Series of Unfortunate Events up on the bookcase.  Fun for all ages!  Right next to Crime and Punishment and Ethan Frome!  And hell, if Invisible fucking Man is going to get a spot on my bookshelves, you can damn well be sure that Caddie Woodlawn will too, seeing as how I spent way more time enjoying that than I ever did some Ralph Ellison shit.

Going through all my old books was still very fun, though.  I hadn’t cleaned off the shelves since the first time they were put up which was about, uh, four years ago?  And apparently at the time when I was a sophomore in high school, I still had the heart and soul of an eight year old, because there was shit up there like Amelia’s Notebook, all of the I Spy books, and some American Girl series.  As well as some books I had never read: Heart of a Dog, anyone?  Prehaps some Black Beauty?  Well, at least they’re all stored away in my closet with my books from when I was in kindergarten. 

And, as if all this trip down memory lane weren’t already enough, just as I was finishing up, “Stop This Train” came on and I seriously got all teary eyed, like “Yeah!  Stop!  Jesus!”  But this is basically how I feel every other day of my life, so I just rode it out and went on with my life.