You are, right now, in the great scheme of things, a placeholder holding a place. You walk down a flight of stairs, put on a hard hat and reflective vest, push open and walk through two double doors, and assess the situation. As always, it feels like you are beginning anew.

Books, in boxes, are everywhere, yet not where they were before. You often inquire as to who moved them, and get blank looks. The floor workers, the ones who push around the recyclables, they hurry past you because they see your efforts as being a waste of time.

On the day that you are thinking of, there are six shopping carts filled full to overflowing with paperbacks. You glance in one and a copy of George Orwell’s 1984 fairly leaps out at you. You pull it, along with a mint copy of Curious George and the Puppies, and put it in a box of books to be categorized.

The floor is noisy. It’s dusty. You are a volunteer, paid in copies of books that you take home, a good number of which you send on to family members and friends. Hoorah for media rate you think – without it, you’d be living in a poor house.

You know what’s needed, more space, so that you could better display a larger number of books. Others think similarly. This afternoon, for example, you attended a Zoom meeting with three other members of the VCRS Recycling Board,

A fair wiind home

others were also to attend but were noone of whom is your husband. A few t present. No matter, the ones who were there agreed with you, that there needs to be a designated area for the books.

You have, in the past, attended committee meetings. And so, you know that the beast moves slow, really slow. And this time is not going to be exception. Every single little detail is going to be gnawed upon again and again and again. Yep, it’s going to take several years before there’s a ribbon cutting for The Bright Lights Book Project shop.

The question, then, is can you hang in there that long, working in a not so nice environment? You aren’t sure. You’re never sure. What keeps you going is this – you take a second look around before leaving and realize that, yes, the book project, now almost a year old, is still going. You have literally gotten hundreds of books into the hands of grateful readers. And you will get literally hundreds more books into the hands of other grateful readers.

And you are well aware that in order to keep from getting discouraged in the interim, you now constantly remind yourself that the best you can do at this point in time is to be a placeholder. You’ll continue to do what you do so well, sort, categorize, distribute books, minimally. It would of course be foolhardy to give this project your all right now. This is because you are in this for the long haul. And in time, what you envision is what will come to be.

Next: 269. 9/29/20: No Ideas but in Things