If you’d asked me a week ago, I’d have told you that any end-of-year missive I wrote would be a bulleted overview of the year past. The movie, the new job, the eleven states I visited. The one wedding and the three funerals. The projects I finished. The unwritten contracts I broke. Things lost, things gained — all things 2022.
But as the year dwindled to its final hours, the task began to seem insurmountable. I haven’t kept a reliable diary this year to cross-reference. I stopped using my bullet journal in October of 2021. The best record I have of this year is here, in the archives of this very publication (which, you may have noticed, I’ve been sending far less regularly since fall).
I’m ending the year in Santa Fe. Yesterday, I closed my work computer and ventured out under unusually low clouds to to buy a birthday present for my dad. That done, and with some time to myself, I went to a local used book store. I was hoping to find a book on the medicinal properties of plants. Specifically, I wanted a reference book, preferably decades old, that leaned more toward “Science” than “New-Age,” categorically speaking. It seemed like the kind of thing that would be easy to find in New Mexico.
The store I visited is in a strange but active mall near my dad’s house. I’d been there before, but I’d forgotten what it is like inside. Neat shelves line the outer walls, organized by topic but not by any further criteria. New books — fiction, non-fiction — are laid out on tables up front1
Then there’s the middle of the bookstore.
Stacked like blocks, thick towers of hardcover books rise from the ground to waist-level, shoulder-level, and some higher still. Many of the volumes have been wrapped with a cellophane book cover, lending them a certain library-book quality. The titles range huge strides back and forth across topic. The Bamboo Fences of Japan. Adlai Stevenson’s Public Years. The Passionate Sightseer. The Inscriptions from Temple XIX at Palenque. The Five Bells and Bladebone. Art books, cookbooks, history books. One on top of another.
I looked at the piles that dominated the floorspace and I nearly walked right back out into the mall. Time’s a-wasting, you see. I’d been expecting order. I was looking for something just shy of specific, and the prospect of seeking it out from among piles of unruly stacks of who-knows-what overwhelmed me instantly.
But I decided to look just a little. Or perhaps “decided” is not the word. A cookbook by Mary Berry caught my eye, and I wanted to flip through its pages. In order to grab it, I had to unstack the pile of books on top of it. One by one, I did so, only to find on my way a beautiful book from the PHAIDON imprint titled What to Bake and How to Bake It. A book about adobe. A book about flower arrangement.
I saw then that I related to this pile of books. This pile of books was my year. This pile of books was my life.
I can’t quite tell if it’s age, a change in habits, busyness, or late-pandemic Weltschmerz, but the dominating sensation of my 2022 has been that it’s all just so much. “How was your day?” my roommate would ask me on any occasion that we were both home after work. I’d find myself recapping the last hour or two, only to realize I’d forgotten some far more momentous event of that morning. How much harder, then, to sum up a week, a month, a year.
Even my slowdown in publishing this newsletter is linked to this feeling. Sure, time is scarce. But I’m not at a loss for things to say. If anything, I’ve been struggling to choose what moment or event to blow up into a thousand-word essay. Mostly, I find myself wanting to share obscure scraps with you: How I went to five grocery stores searching for high-quality white chocolate. Or I’m inclined to go meta and talk about the newsletter process itself: How I wrote the rough draft of today’s letter on the back pages of a used up notebook because I’d torn out all the blank pages so my cousin’s two girls could draw on them while the adults ate enchiladas. But the little events are superseded by whatever happens next, sinking down, down, into the ever-growing pile. The pile swells and feels too unruly to sort through, too overwhelming to approach.
Until you do.
It took time to unstack each cellophane-bound volume in order to get to the book I wanted to see. At first, that was annoying. It was slow. Each one was heavy and hard to reach. But as I glanced at every successive cover, I gradually understood that this was no pile of junk. These were some really interesting books! They were different. They were weird. I liked what I saw. And it made me wonder if maybe this unruly stack wasn’t a drawback of the used bookstore. Maybe it was a feature. Maybe it was the whole point of choosing this place over any other. So you could take your time and make, instead of a selection, a discovery.
I left the shop with a stack of books, some old, some new. An antique cookbook from the dawn of the electric refrigerator. A book of quick knitting patterns. An Oxford illustrated guide to edible plants. I didn’t find what I’d gone looking for. But I left with what I needed.
Happy New Year to you, reading this. Thanks for giving me a reason to write this stuff. Here’s a wish for space and joy for you in 2023. Happy stack-making — don’t forget to take the time to look through them once in a while.
Two new nonfiction books on the topic of herbal medicine greeted me moments after I entered the store. Not quite what I was looking for, but still: New Mexico, man.
Happy New Year to you too! Missing, early on, your semicolons. Flew to The Loo the 16th; Grandma Lois got out to Pietro's, and hosted Erika and her Hub. I only beat her & Chris at SCRABBLE by the "Q"!