Thirty-one Trips, Plus One to India

I don’t need a gym membership – don’t even need the treadmill I own. All I require is  a never-ending line of people selling me glorious books to provide all the workout any Woman of a Certain Age can handle. Ohio’s weather has been brutally hot – early and continuously – so Sunday Eric and I decided we absolutely, positively HAD to devote the entire day to the removal of all boxes of books from the garage. Between the two collections (the one with the lawyer and the Ohio stuff I’d wanted so badly) we’d started out with about 250 boxes, but I’d previously sorted maybe 85-90 myself over a period of days on and off. So that left us with a nice manageable 160 or so. We dug in with great enthusiam around 8 a.m.

All day lawnmowers roared, kids whizzed by on bikes and skateboards, cars pulled into  driveways for house parties, people laughed uproariously, and the air filled with the scent, first of charcoal fires, and then of sizzling steaks. We couldn’t see the back of the house of course, but we didn’t need to. We knew. Pedal boats and canoes churned up water on the lake and sent the ducks scattering. Yet still we forged on, hot, dirty, and clad in outfits so outlandish I’d freak if somebody strolled up the drive and caught us. Eric wore old khaki shorts and a plaid shirt so thin it’s practically transparent from an overdose of Tide. I, on the other hand,  chose an even more  enchanting ensemble  consisting of navy blue shorts (I would NEVER wear shorts in public) and a huge ebay tee-shirt that I used to sleep in, but demoted after I broke up with them in 2010. To this day every permanent stain it acquires fills me with a delicious sense of fulfilled karma. But that's another story ...

Getting back to the real story,  we finished up around 7 p.m. with four sealed cartons for the Medina library sale in July and another two big boxes for the Project Learn bookstore uptown on the square. Eric also made  four trips to the recycling center, but this turned out to be fun because he discovered  people rooting through his previous loads. We both hate taking books there even when they’re musty, broken, dirty and worn-out, but if you want to be a happy book dealer you’d be wise to learn where it’s located.

By 7p.m. though the car was back in its former home and the boxes designated for donation stood neatly stacked and labeled against the side wall. All that remained of the books we were keeping was the entire Ohioana collection  which I’d unboxed and shelved in the bookcases against the wall. They looked fabulous, but  by then my high spirits had sunk to a funk.

“Do you realize that we just wasted a beautiful day?” I said to Eric. “A day we’ll never get back?”

“Wow –Norman Vincent Peale lives in Medina!” he smirked.  “I’m going to take a shower. Is there anything to eat?

If food is leverage, I thought to myself,  I am about to hoist one very sweet deal.  “That depends,” I replied. “If you promise we can have fun all day tomorrow there’s something VERY good for dinner. Otherwise … “ My voice drifted off with just the sweetest tinge of regret.

“Okay, okay! Tomorrow we’ll l have fun -- even if it kills us!”

And so for dinner I lovingly produced a gorgeous fresh salmon fettucine, fresh steamed broccoli with lemon and a chilled bottle of pino grigio. The next morning around eleven we went happily off to see another collection (the appointment had already been cut in stone), but it only took forty-five minutes and we left with a manageable five books. From there we went to Panera for lunch, then came home and -- okay, did a few chores, but they were my idea -- before heading off to Akron for a movie and dinner. We thought the theatre might be empty due to the great weather, but a fairly long line snaked through the vestibule for tickets. I love trying to guess what movie each group or person will pick when they get to the window. This time it was almost too easy though. Everybody was old, so, like us, all but one used their senior discount for The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. This could have been depressing, but really wasn’t because I would have chosen the same movie had I been thirty. Besides, we were younger than everybody else anyway. AND the movie was so much fun we’d hitched a plane to India and were long gone.

Two hours later we returned with a thud  to Akron just as the the credits rolled, then immediately headed down the road to the newly reopened  Macaroni Grill (the former one burned down) for pasta Milano. from there we headed home to spend a quiet evening READING. It's  been awhile since I'd seriously indulged in leisurely reading, except fort he day I wrote about reading in the bathtub, but that doesn't count. I'm not talking about aquatic reading here --I'm talking about sitting in the family room like a normal person quietly reading a book! Somehow inspite of my lack of practice my brain got right in the groove and I read three chapters of Michener's The Novel which I'd somehow overlooked back in the 90's.

But then came this  morning and with it  rain, heat, and unbearable humidity. I began writing this blog post around eight-thirty, but the more the rain fell the more I thought of those beautiful books locked up in that hothouse known as the garage. Two paragraphs in and I jumped to my feet, ran down the basement where two dehumidifiers hummed happily, and consolidated the books I kept from the big inventory purge I conducted on Friday. Once I had an entire bookcase free I made thirty-one – that's right -- thirty-one trips UP and thirty-one trips DOWN the stairs to transfer the collection. As luck would have it, every single book fit.

Which means I will not be needing the treadmill any time soon.