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Freezing in Position: Handling Stress
The expression “fight or flight” totally missed what took over, as getting Dave down a flight of stairs, in through a doorway, from one room to another, and into his socks became the foundation of my days. “Freeze” belongs in there. Freeze as much as possible … don’t yield. Don’t panic.
Still, our rooms full of books slowly became a mixed bag for me. Yes, there was still the delight of finding rare and lovely books, and our excursions to meet their authors became joyful strands of our marriage. We also worked hard at inviting authors to present their new work to an audience of a dozen collectors, at Kingdom Books, in the south end of our sprawling house. Roberta H, a devoted baker a couple miles away, pressed us to schedule more, so she could fix more refreshments! That’s a great friend and ally to have, indeed.
On the other hand, the book collections kept growing. In the half-finished basement, where Dave’s Jewish books perched, I ran out of shelf space. That seemed so unreasonable, given the ample floor space and walls of the basement. So I wrestled with the layout and stacked shelving in the center of the room, six feet high, and rearranged all the topics, making more shelf space for the ones that kept swelling — Jewish history, Jewish life, memoirs of the Holocaust (divided into women’s memoirs, children’s, and general), and anti-Semitism, where new…
