Introduction to Neuropsychology
Not really… the blog title I mean. What I can tell you about neuropsychology can fit on the head of a pin, along with the innumerable dancing angels*. We’ve been cleaning out the all-over-the-house bookshelves and condensing them all to create the upstairs hallway library and research corridor. For the time being, here in my study, a book shelf Val’s dad made sits right in front of my desk, just behind my monitor. It’s where we’re piling the books awaiting their hall relocation . They’ve journeyd to this location from places in this house that I never knew were bookshelves… like the 1960s stereo cabinet in the living room. I always thought it was full of non-functioning out-dated stereo parts but no. Val tore the guts out of the cabinet about six months ago. After spending a few weeks as a truly bizarro box for Ollie to climb into and “do some good work, give me another piece of paper, please” play, the cabinet became a book storage unit. And that, my friends, is where the Introduction to Neuropsychology comes in. The stack about two feet from my face has these titles:
Mao Tse-Tung on Guerrilla Warfare
Beginning German: A Practical Approach
Physical Therapy Services in the Developmental Disabilities
the aforementioned tome
Conversational German
Readers Digest Condensed Books Vol. XXIII (Autumn 1955) containing, I shit you not, a book titled: This is Google. Now that I’ve noticed that bit of oddness, I have to stop writing and look at whatever that is. Were we having a phone conversation, this is the part where I’d say, “Let me get back to you, something’s come up…” but since you can’t know I’m going to be gone from here for a bit, let me just go on without a pause. I’m wrong. It’s This is GOGGLE or the Education of a Father by Bentz Plagemann. Okay. Never mind. Where was I?
Moving books. It’s tough, see, because we keep stopping to read them. Or Val will suddenly remember where a book came from — we have her grandfather’s Latin and Greek textbooks from Ohio Northern University, 1899, or it will be one of the 100 volumes I brought home from the Sisters of Mercy a couple years ago and those are books we just now have time to appreciate — the work is slow but not in any sense ponderous.
Val’s family made me a bibliophile. It took us six dwellings to settle on this one, six times moving her collection of books, each move becoming more onerous and heavy. We came to this old house (hey, what a great name for a PBS series) with three years of my wife working as reviewer, columnist, and books editor at Popmatters. There’s a couple large stacks of the”reviewed” books in one corner, waiting to be moved. My over 250 books (just guessing amount, I swear there are dozens of programming manuals, each one 2 inches thick and weighing in at at least 7 pounds plus all those books from the Catholic school’s book-sale, my purchases from the antique stores), leaning against another stack of books not reviewed but enjoyed by Val, (books sent to Val from publishers wanting a review), there’s our FC2 collection, Ruth’s books – a 90 years in the making stack or twelve (including ALL volumes of Will
and Auriel Durant’s history of the world). Children’s books — The original Dr Seuss’s, Raggedy Ann and Andy’s, a huge bunch of pointless books waiting to be dissected and carved and turned into art by my eccentric but wonderful wife. Oh, must not forget the coffee table books by the German publisher Die Gestalten Verlag including our most favorite book in the world, their match-head sized “The World’s Smallest Book” in its wooden box. The coffee table is now a toddler-time play table, but eventually should return to grown-up use.
I’m exhausted just trying to define what we have, let alone put them on shelves (and dust them.) But the hallway is beginning to look truly wonderful. We’ve realized a big bonus in our walls o’ literature — Acoustics. Stairway sounds are now muffled as they travel insidiously toward the study, the bedroom… the shuffling Ruth, the washer/dryer, the dogs…
I wanted to write in more detail about what we have and will come back in a bit to link to some of the titles, but I must stop blogging because Washington and the Pamlico (our area’s contribution to the 1976 bicentennial commission books) is peeking out from under the American Heritage Dictionary. Bee looking for that book for a year! It has great local information — a front-porch storyteller’s history of the area.
*dancing angels? Ruth told me the Heinolds (or maybe the Chapmans? no matter) would argue about how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. It was a discussion of faith, I believe.
