White Polka Dots

 

 

When I decide it’s time to de-accession a book in order to make more shelf space, more breathing space, for other books both old and new, and when I’m therefore poised to put this particular book in a box with other recently singled-out books to take down to the Strand or up to Book Culture and possibly sell—when this happens, I pull the book in question down from a shelf and open it.
   As I leaf through the pages, I come upon a passage I don’t remember having read before. The book is Against Wind and Tide: Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s Letters and Journals, 1947–1986. This passage isn’t from a letter or a journal; it’s from “Musical Chairs,” a talk the author gave in 1981, when she was a few years older than I am now. Today that talk is rich for me with meaning it evidently didn’t have when my friend Reeve Lindbergh, on one of her rare visits to New York, gave me a copy of her mother’s book, which she had edited beautifully. This was 2012.
   Mrs. Lindbergh, who died in 2001, has moved beyond aging. But I still inhabit the zone of the . . .
. . . . . . .
[ subscribers: login for full text ]