End of Storage Note:
Stable
15 March 2019

¶ How nice it would be to say that we have digested all of the stuff that arrived from the last of our storage units on Monday, and that the apartment looked as though nothing happened! In fact, we haven’t found places for much of anything. But everything has found a temporary perch, one that we can live with for another week or two. Litter and disorder have been Dealt With. 

The two clothes racks remain in the foyer. Since they’re on wheels, they’re easy to move out of the way whenever we need access to the sideboard. That isn’t too often, and they’re not in the way of regular traffic. 

The books are piled on two tray tables in the living room (remember, there are not so many as I feared), and on a garden chair in the book room. The garden chair used to sit outside on the balcony, but I shuffled it indoors to make room for another piece, a much more comfortable metal rocking chair that I had kept in the storage unit to sit on during the purely imaginary visits that I planned to make, every so often, to what I liked to think of as a library annex. (No such call was ever paid.) Also displaced was my grandmother’s French chair — which may have been venerable in her day. A small piece, nicely carved but not actually dainty, it has returned to its original spot in the foyer, where it has been missed.

Kathleen has tried on most of the clothes. The ones that no longer fit are going to charity, as soon as she fills out the form for a tax deduction. Ray Soleil and I hope to move the clothes to the shop on the clothes rack, saving us a bundle of extra work and giving Second Avenue a breath of Seventh Avenue atmosphere — if the charity will allow it. (They’ll get to keep the rack.) 

As for books…

There’s a copy of Julia Child’s My Life in France, published in 2006. I’ve also got the galley proof, which a friend sent to me to read before the book came out. Why do I keep it? Because on page 56, there’s the following gem: 

Out of curiosity, and partly inspired by Audrey Hepburn’s character in Sabrina, I dropped by L’École du Cordon Bleu, Paris’s famous cooking school. 

I remember scratching my head when I read this the first time. Mrs Child is writing of things that happened in the late Forties. (1949 to be exact.) According to IMDb, Hepburn’s first real movie appeared in 1951, Sabrina not until 1954. Inspiration appears to have been strictly retrospective. Happily, the French Chef’s appealing but false recollection, which had probably hardened into concrete decades before My Life in France was dictated, does not appear in the published text: kudos to an attentive editor at Knopf. It would have been mortifying had the mistake not been caught, but as mistakes go, this one warms the cackler in my heart.

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