I do not like thee, Doctor Fell,
The reason why—I cannot tell;
But this I know, and know full well,
I do not like thee, Doctor Fell

It is four in the morning on the tenth of October. I’m writing in bed because there is no more sleep this day.

It is four in the morning on the tenth of October. I’m writing in bed because there is no more sleep this day.

There were only 20 pages left of The Mad Hatter Mystery by John Dickson Carr. When I knew sleep was not returning, I switched on the crane neck lamp clamped to my headboard and finished it. The ending was excellent. The Collier paperback edition I read was the “Third Printing 1969.” The cover art by Milton Glaser. The book was originally published in 1933. It takes place in prewar London.

Time travel.

The Tower of London is pretty much unchanged from 1933. So is Mayfair.

London. I’ll be there before long. I miss it dearly.

It is cold, quiet and black outside. 48 degrees. My room is a cool 63. I pulled on the heavy wool socks I bought them in Estonia in midsummer. They are thick but light. You’ll see the story of how I bought appended to the end of this story.

Odd. If your feet are warm, so is the rest of you.

Oh! Carr’s detective hero is Dr. Gideon Fell. He is hugely fat and requires a cane.

He is not the same Doctor Fell of the 17th century rhyme above. It is now considered by many to be a nursery rhyme, though originally it was written by an Oxford student as a kind of insult to his professor.

At Connecticut College, I had a zoology professor named Dr. Fell. I liked him a lot. He was kind of cold and distant, but was somehow likable in his focused scientific demeanor.

Soon, I must get up and start the day. It will be a long one. There’s a lab appointment at 8:30. Then the workday will start. It will be a concentrated one. I need to get a lot done before going away next week.

A bookseller friend is flying in this afternoon to shop at the stores and warehouse for a couple days before we leave for Amsterdam together.

The dawn is nearly blood red on the horizon.

The week began with two dead trees. They stood about fifty feet from my bedroom window. Sunday evening, I got it into my head that I should drop them.

Two dead trees on the mountain slope
They should be left to fall on their own
But winter is coming and firewood’s a need
So out into the forest with a saw in darkening day
The lower is first and notched to drop
downhill and away from the porch and steps
Then a slanted cut on the uphill side
The tall tree leans and the cut gapes
High above dead branches snag live neighbors
The trunk twists and turns awry
It will not drop without more cuts
The top is ugly dead and brittle
Deadfalls, widow makers loom high above
I’ll let time and nature and perhaps good wind
finish the task to get the tree to ground
The second tree is twenty paces uphill
Just as dead and tall
Ten times my height
The downhill side is notched
The other side sliced on a slant
It leans and groans and rests
against a living tree just below it
I cut down two trees today
severed trunk from stump
and neither fell to earth

One came to the ground on its own. The other may be snagged for a while.

---

The weekend was devoted to carts.

The usual.

And when I was done with those, I rolled the last dusty “put aside” carts to the area I was working in.

When I was done, there was a debris field on floor all about me.

To make the mess, I sorted through hundreds of sheets and pamphlets and compromised books and… stuff. Stuff too nice or cool or wondrous to put out unprotected, too obscure to attempt to catalog them online, too difficult to decide on the fly. And so they’ve waited. More oddments were piled atop them until the cart was mostly obscured by the sheets and pages and… stuff flowing over the shelf edges.

Well, it was time. Part of the reason was I’m going away, and I wanted to free up as many carts as possible. Wonder Book—The Warehouse runs on four-wheel six-shelf three-foot-long metal carts. Well, much of it does. Carts flow through the aisles of the vast building like corpuscles in your body’s blood vessels.

Page after print after advertisement after booklet after… stuff.

Binder’s notes.

Who ever saw such a cool vestige of a book’s assembly?

The 18th-century letterpress leaf just struck me for its uniqueness. If the bookbinder didn’t adhere to these instructions, the final product would be misbound—or incomplete. The toned sheet is the publisher “speaking” to the bookbinder centuries ago.

What should I do with it?

No one else here could make a decision on such a thing.

Hell, I’ve been unable to make a decision on it for years.

It was time. I put it in a box with other prints and ephemera to be bagged and hung up for sale in one of the stores.

I did this hundreds of times over the workday hours of Saturday and Sunday. When I was done, carts that had been out of service for years—laden with dead storage—were cleared and ready to be put back into use.

There were more than a few sneezing fits.

My hands were dry and soiled with the dust of the ages.

But at least I’d given these things a chance.

---

Monday was the beginning of a monstrous week.

I was driven to get things done.

Some of it was anticipation for the trip to the rare book congress in Amsterdam coming up. But I think there is also something going on with the internal clock in me.

“It’s time.”

“Do it now.”

Before… before… before… it’s too late?

‘What are you telling me?’ I asked the timekeeper side me.

‘I’m not telling you,’ was the reply.

‘You’re not going to tell me why?’ I asked. ‘Or you’re just “telling” me—instructing me what to do?’

There was no reply. Just the silent ticking of my heart beat.

I went to the Frederick store to get away from the pressure. There was an order for 160 linear feet of “Well Worn Classics.” That means used looking literature hardcovers. That’s a lot of books. 1800? More? But it is easy, physical labor. “Easy” in that I’ve done it so many times I can do it with little thought involved. I see and slide the book off the shelf and drop it into a plastic tub while my mind is elsewhere—thinking of other things.

“Instructions to the binder…”

“Instructions to my successors…”

“No one else can do this…”

“Someday, someone else will have to do this…”

Or will they just toss the odd bits?

When I’d culled literature from A to Z plus anthologies, drama, poetry… and the tubs were loaded in the van, I went back to the warehouse. More carts had been filled and were awaiting me. But these were easy carts. I can make most of the decisions on these books while part of my mind wanders elsewhere.

---

It is Friday morning. Cold. The phone says it is 39 in the valley below. The windows are closed, but there’s no need for a fire or to turn the furnace on. The house holds enough heat to keep it in the 60s inside.

The week rushed by.

But then they all do.

The evenings were mostly occupied with DVDs of The Silmarillion. (That is Amazon’s venture into Tolkien’s worlds with the series The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power.) It’s pretty good once you get past some of the basic flaws. Hours and hours.

“Just one more episode…”

I went to the eye specialist late Tuesday afternoon. They were running late. I sat in the waiting room for over an hour. Then tests in one little room. Move to another room for more tests. Then to another. I have no symptoms, but there’s something inside my eyes that’s of concern. They want to rule out progressive problems. When it was done, I was given a sheet of lab orders. I’ll need to go to three places to get those tests done.

All this made me late picking up dinner to take to my son and daughter-in-law in Pennsylvania. She likes vegetarian stuff. I had Szechuan rice with crispy tofu. It was quite good. Mostly, I was there to see the new baby. He’s still in semi-seclusion to keep from being exposed to germs until he’s built up immunity. I only stayed a little while. But it was great to see the tiny thing.

A miracle.

Wednesday was a visit to the accountant. The final taxes were done, and I had to sign form after form. I grossly overpaid, but they wanted to leave the money in the government’s hands until next year.

“We think you might owe more then.”

My (perhaps failing) eyes glazed over.

Thursday, I pushed myself to get ahead in order to go away. I finished the last active cart just as my bookseller friend, Laurelle, was arriving from the airport. She’ll shop at the warehouse and glass cases at the store for a couple days. I hope she finds enough to make the trip worthwhile. She specializes in beautiful books.

We went to an easy place for dinner and caught up on all the gossip. Two martinis…

Each.

The thermometer up here says it is 49 degrees outside. It is usually warmer up here. I guess the cold air sinks?

I let Giles out. Merry and Pip are already at the babysitter. I put tea on to warm up. I timed it so I’d see the sunrise. The phone always has the time of it to the minute.

Laurelle’s asleep downstairs, so I tread carefully. She’s on California time and so might be out for a while yet.

I have plenty to do.

The housekeeper came Tuesday, and my home is sparkling. I’m so proud of the changes and organization here. Laurelle enjoyed exploring some of the book collection up here, and we watched some Rings of Power before it was time for her to crash. I went to bed not long after.

---

The Last Leg of the Baltic States

Before getting on the bus in Riga, Latvia, I went around back of the hotel and visited the abandoned home one last time. I circled the fenced in property. I considered the large overgrown yard and felt the ghosts of children playing there. Birthday parties. Whatever the Latvian equivalent of cookouts are.

Clothes hung to dry. Young couples courting. Perhaps a grandpa sitting on the porch smoking a pipe.

The generations appeared and went away one after the other until the last put the place up for rent as the neighborhood became more commercial. Perhaps the plumbing was too old or the owners just gave up on tenant problems and abandoned the place.

I’m sure I was the only one in the group that had feelings for the sad old, doomed place. I guess I’m easily hooked by the evocative.

Then we were onto the bus and heading up the Baltic coast to Estonia.

While Latvian and Lithuanian are pretty closely related, Estonian is completely different. It is of Finnish language descent. “Wife carrying” is a national sport, apparently. It has the cleanest air? 2000 islands (the sea freezes for a long period, and people drive their vehicles over the ice to them.) The capital city of Tallinn is a UNESCO site, and I would see why soon.

On the way, we made a lunch stop is the seaside resort of Parnu. The beach was pretty crowded. It was the end of July, and the window for sunbathing and swimming is pretty short in this cold part of the world. Carl Faberge was born in Parnu.

Then it was on to Tallinn.

On the way, I used my phone to look for things I might want to see in that city. One that popped up right away was “Fat Margaret.”

‘Weird!’ I thought. ‘They consider a pub to be a landmark.’

A little further research taught me that Margaret was a medieval tower and housed a nautical museum. The word “Fat” means tower, I think.

As soon as we were dropped at the hotel, I Ubered to Fat Margaret. Their showpiece is a medieval cargo ship called a “cog.” It was found buried in the mud in 2015 near what had been the seaport when it sunk in the late 1400s. Not only was the vessel mostly intact, it was laden with artifacts that had sunk with it. Cooking equipment. Leather shoes and hats. The exhibit was a slice of life from 600 years ago. From there, the museum wound upward through different eras of commercial and military nautical life until you get to the roof, which has a cafe and a stunning view of the ancient city.

I had a beer up there and took in the 360-degree views of land and sea.

Then I left Fat Margaret and walked through the old town. It is very well preserved with narrow cobbled streets and defensive walls and towers and ancient buildings.

The next day, we had a local guide to lead us. She was an older woman and told of the Soviet takeover in the early 20th century.

“My mother and grandmother were sent to Siberia. My mother was only one year old. My great grandfather was a pastor, and when he was caught performing a funeral service, he was taken outside and shot in front of his family. Religion was a capital offense.”

The economy is “negative” because older people are using benefits they never paid in for. The big church of St. Nicholas was bombed by the Soviets and rebuilt as the Museum of Atheism.

Later, she took us to the Holocaust and Soviet murders shrine with thousands of victim’s names engraved on the parallel walls.

“This section has members of my family.” She raised an arm and pointed. “That was my grandfather. We find names of victims still and add them. For a while, the Russians cooperated by unsealing some of the records. Now our neighbors to the east are not so friendly.”

The city is full of interesting restaurants and shops. Amber shops are everywhere, and we were cautioned to purchase on “certified” amber, as the Russians have gotten very good at creating fakes. Tallinn was my favorite of all the cities on that tour. I wrote about some of the visit when I was there in “My Nobel Prize in Stockholm.”

We also visited Kadriorg Palace and Art Museum. It was a summer palace started by Czar Peter 1 in 1718 for his wife Catherine. Apparently, neither of them got to use it, but Catherine the Great did in the 1770s. Though it was closed, our guide pulled strings, and we got a private tour of the opulent place and excellent art museum.

I need to cut this off here.

But in the earlier story, I wrote about the woolen socks I bought from a street vendor at the lower gate to Tallinn. Wednesday was cold enough that I had occasion to them on for the first time.

Here’s how I got them (from my earlier blog):

The wizened woman was still there at the grubby public bench she had commandeered. Her face was burned and aged, with many wrinkles from decades of sun reflected on sea and snow. I chose a pair of socks from the dozen or so she had laid out for sale among some berries and “stuff.”

“Ten?”

She nodded and smiled.

Was I supposed to dicker?

I could never.

The quality was good. 27 Euros in the shop where I found some just as good.

She clasped her hands together and shook them to the heavens. She bowed and nodded. She smiled like the sun. Her teeth weren’t too bad.

You would have thought I’d supplied food for her grandchildren who had not eaten for days.

When cold weather comes, those socks will be a memorable acquisition.

After a bit of walking, I returned and bought a second pair.

A cold night
Bitter for October
My feet felt it deep
in their many tiny bones
I found my Estonian socks
Bought from a grandma
at the lower gate
into the medieval city
She vended them upon a bench
much like a millennium ago
I paid the price
She wrung her hands to heaven in thanks
It was high summer
The only warm time in that cold clime
I recalled them this cold night
and pulled them on
Thick soft light woolen warm
If any clothes In own are magic
perhaps these are
Woven in icy lands
Warmth rises up my legs
No one else in this land
wears such wondrous footwear