The Friends of the Library sale here runs the same weekend every October, a church basement a few blocks off the main drag packed floor to ceiling with folding tables sorted loosely by genre, science fiction bleeding into general fiction bleeding into a religion section nobody ever seems to browse. I’ve gone every year since Priya and I moved in together, which puts me at six straight now, and I’ve noticed something about myself doing this that I didn’t expect when I started.

The first year or two I went with a real plan, a list of titles I’d been meaning to track down, and I’d hunt the tables methodically until I’d found what I came for or exhausted the possibility. That’s not really what happens anymore. Now I show up with no list at all and just work the tables in order, spine by spine, and the books that actually come home with me are almost never the ones I’d have gone looking for on purpose. That’s how I ended up with the beat-up Ballantine paperback of Steps to an Ecology of Mind that took me a solid quarter to actually finish, yellow cover, red block lettering, a dollar, sitting in a box marked “philosophy/misc” that I only checked because it was between two boxes I actually wanted.

I think what I’m actually there for, six years in, is less the books themselves and more the specific choreography of the day. The same volunteer runs the cash box every year, an older woman who always asks what I’m reading lately and genuinely seems to remember the answer from the year before. The same slightly too-warm basement smell, coffee and old paper and whatever’s cooking upstairs for whatever the church has going that weekend. Priya doesn’t come anymore, she came the first two years and decided a church basement full of dusty boxes wasn’t her idea of a good Saturday morning, which is fair, and I’ve made peace with this being one of the few things I do alone rather than as a we.

I always tell myself I’ll donate a box back the following year to make room, and I never quite do it, which means the shelf situation Priya’s mentioned more than once keeps getting worse by exactly one dollar-a-book church basement’s worth every October. I don’t have a real plan to fix that. I’ve got a notebook that tracks what I read and a sticky note taped in a game box for rules disputes, and apparently no equivalent system at all for the actual problem of where anything goes once I’m done with it.