Hello, friends.
This was supposed to come out earlier today but then it was supposed be written yesterday and neither happened. I usually try to handle the newsletter writing on Saturdays so they can be sent out on Sunday. For some reason, yesterday got away from me. It was busy in my household though I wasn’t all that busy. Pamela spent the day making a cake for our daughter’s friend’s birthday party today. She hopes to try to make baking a side-hustle so this was kinda like her testing it out. I’m super proud and she’s probably unhappy that I’ve written that. But her baking and futzing around the kitchen all day was partly why I didn’t get the newsletter done.
My desk is right there. Our apartment’s living room, dining room, and kitchen are all one big room separated by carpeting and an 8.75” wall (I measured). I could’ve brought my laptop into the bedroom but I wanted to be accessible if she needed help. I figured I’d write it Saturday night.
Then it was suddenly Saturday night. And suddenly their bedtime. It went by so fast.
Pamela and G have just left for the party as I write this. Today’s essay was written earlier this morning and posted to Patreon for subscribers to get a First Look. So, let’s get into this week’s updates.
Welcome to the 124th installment of Gauthic Times, the newsletter about my writing, my life, and boxes of books.
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I wrote about 2,100 words on Project: Moons this week. That brings the project up to 24 pages and 5,600 words. There were a few times when the words were a struggle and a few when they flowed with ease.
I’ve been thinking a lot about a concept I’ve had since around 2000 or 2001. It’s starting to come together more and more and I wanted to check a book I have to see something, but the book is somewhere in the apartment. The good thing about not being able to easily find it is that it spurred this week’s essay.
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There are books that I own that have been in boxes for almost 20 years. Maybe some that have been in boxes even longer. Every few years I do a purge and those books get to see the light of day for a little bit, only to be returned the boxes and put back in closet that is filled with boxes of books and collectible. But mostly books.
How did this happen?
Because time works against us.
There was an era of my life when I moved about every two years. It started in late 1997 and continued until 2009. The last move was meant to be temporary. I’m still waiting to be able to move again.
In 1997, I found out I was going to be a father. I found out a month or two before I turned 20. My girlfriend moved into the apartment I lived in with my parents and younger sister. In December 1997, the people who lived in the apartment downstairs from my parents left and we moved in. That was the first move I’d done since 1988, when I was 11.
In October 1999, our small family moved into a different apartment. It wasn’t a good place. Needed tons of work that never happened. The house was eventually sold by a terrible piece of shit who called himself a realtor but had screwed over a bunch of people and we moved again in October 2001.
Because we were poor and desperate, my wife and I chose a too-small apartment in a bad area. Many of my books and such stayed in boxes in a closet, but many were on the two large bookcases I’d had since that 1997 move.
I was in that apartment until I realized my young marriage wasn’t good for anyone and I moved out in March of 2004.
“Ah!” I hear you say. “You said you moved every two years, but 2001 through 2004 is three years!”
Yes. Math. But…I knew the marriage was ending in the spring of 2003 and it took nearly a year for me to make the money to move out.
My next apartment was in a historic mansion in the middle of the city and I loved it, but the price was going up and I couldn’t afford it, so in spring of 2005, I moved again.
The new apartment was nice and I’d intended to stay a long time. But remember my quip about math above? Yeah, well, I’m not great with math and I made a mistake and suddenly I was out of money. I had to do the unthinkable. So, in September 2005, the same month my divorce became final, I moved back into the apartment my parents lived in. It fit differently in 2005 than it had in 1997.
I was there until 2007. I became a teacher in that time and my financial outlook was looking better. I’d also met the wonderful Pamela in January of that year and by the summer, we knew this was good. I moved in with her in Jamaica Plain, a neighborhood in Boston, in fall of 2007. I’d been staying there more and more so I felt like, in many ways, I moved there a few months earlier.
In 2009, George W. Bush’s recession hit hard and we had to leave Boston. It broke our hearts but we moved into an apartment in a nice little apartment complex. I was closer to my daughter, my work, and my parents. We didn’t intend to stay.
I’m sitting in that apartment right now typing this.
(I’m taking a sidestep here to say we probably would have moved in 2020, but when Covid happened, things changed and, well, prices of houses are ridiculously expensive now. Our capitalist society kinda sucks).
When I was in Boston, I had those two large bookcases but I still had plenty of books in boxes. I’d worked at two bookstores between 1993 and 2006 and had acquired a healthy little library. When we moved into this apartment, we left my two main bookcases behind. They were old and…well…I don’t really remember why.
We were going to get some bookcases, that was the plan. We bought a camera instead. This was before we had iPhones with amazing cameras. Had I known, I would’ve gone for the bookcases. And then with our child being born in 2012, there was really no room for the bookcases I would need.
And so books live in boxes. And on the bookcase my father built me when I was 14. And here and there.
I mention this because I have a book that I desperately want to look at for something. I know I have it. But I can’t easily grab it to look up what I need to look up. I should’ve put bookcases in the closet where the boxes live. I’d thought about it, but I never did. I should have. And now…who knows? Maybe I still should.
“Why do you have so many books?” you might ask.
Because I can. Kinda? Because my dream is to own a home and have bookcases where I can keep my library within reach for research or for entertainment. And because books calm me.
I love walking through libraries or bookstores. The only thing I like to be surrounded by as much are toys, action figures specifically. They also calm me. But the books, oh, the books.
Each book is a world until itself. Stephen King’s “uniquely portable magic.” They are time machines and magic that can change lives. Books are also a promise.
When you own a book, you intend on reading it. It’s a promise of tomorrow. I know, logically, it’ll be unlikely I will ever read all the books I have. But I intend to. The knowledge of their existence not just out in the greater world but in my possession is a way to keep the things that will ail me and be my ultimate undoing at bay. Again, logically, I know that’s not true, but I also know that it is. Those unknown things that will eventually lead to the dark we are all headed toward are as unknown to me as the millions (or more) words that I have that in boxes or in that closet or in the various stacks, the infinitesimal number of words out there in the world in bookstores, in libraries, and, yes, in closets. Those words that are in our hearts and minds and guts that have yet to be put down.
Books on shelves and in boxes are hope.
Now I just hope I can find that goddamn book I need.
***
That’s it. That’s this week’s newsletter. Thank you so much for subscribing, reading, and for your support.
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Gautham: Bill Gauthier.com 
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