In 2019, I posted about the book accumulation points of Nogglestead.
Since then, we’ve not spent that many Sundays watching football, so the sofa-side table in the family room table only has video controllers on it (although it holds my collection of read literary and Ideals magazines on it.
But we’re going to talk, briefly, about a book accumulation point that has come and gone: The side table by the sofa in the living room.
When my oldest son got his first job in high school, he sometimes worked until closing, which meant he could be home 11:00 or later, and my beautiful wife and/or I would wait up for him. So I had a selection of books and magazines on that table, generally browsers, poetry, or magazines which I could pick up and put down.
Eventually, he got a different job where the fast food joint closed at 9pm (and later jobs with more regular hours), so I didn’t as often sit there in the living room under the fairly dim lamp to read.
But the books and magazines remained there since that time several years ago. As part of the weekly (mostly) grind, I have dusted them the whole time in the interim, but it’s only in Saturday that I put the unread Readers Digest onto the stack of unread magazines in the parlor and only yesterday when I moved the books and decks of cards from the table.
I took the bookmark from an introduction to St. Thomas Aquinas and put it back on the shelf; I think I started reading that on my trip to the Dells in 2022. I put one of my two books on Tai Chi Walking with the bookmark intact onto my reading chair side table–if I took the bookmark out if it now, I would probably not every restart it, and it’s not like I’m missing much by forgetting what I’ve already read (and I have another book on Tai Chi Walking around here to polish up the skill should I need to). I also put the book of prayers that was someone’s personal time capsule on the side table by the chair–I’ll get back to nibbling at it, but my experience in the past is that you really don’t get much from powering through a bunch of prayers all at once.
As to the remote control–to be honest, I’m not sure what that’s for. I will probably throw it into the bin in the storeroom with several decades’ worth of orphaned remotes and a couple of optimistically acquired universal remotes that were not. But that might be another couple of years.
I have mentioned before the slow pace of change at Nogglestead. I mean, I’m the only one who really notices these things, I think. The rest of the family is rather screen-bound (and I waste too many hours doing nothing on my computer, too, don’t get me right), so maybe it matters less to them. I dunno. But if you put something on a table or desk at Nogglestead, it might be there for a very long time indeed.
