G (1)

Welcome to today’s post for the A to Z Blogging Challenge. For each day, I’ll be sharing the opening paragraphs to a book that starts with that letter and is sitting on my shelves or my Kindle.

G is for Good Psychologist

The Good Psychologist by Noam Shpancer

The psychologist sits in his small office, rests his elbows on his deck, buries his face in his hands and wishes that his four o'clock won't show up. He doesn't usually take appointments after three in the afternoon. But he has decided to deviate from his usual routine for her. a small concession because she works late and sleeps late and can only make it in the late afternoon, that's what she said over the phone. Her voice, cheerless and scattered like a motel room abandoned in haste, raised a vague curiosity in him. Small concessions, he likes to tell his clients, are like pocket change: it's what most of us have to work with, in the final analysis. Our small change is our daily habits and routines, our everyday, and the measure of one's life emerges, in the final analysis, from the sum of these everydays.

His daily routine, for example, is simple and straightforwad. He wakes up early each morning in his small apartment, showers and gets dressed. The apartment is deliberately dark. Tall wooden shelves, heavy with books, line the living room walls. In the past, during his days of searching and wandering, he used to immerse himself in these books. He has long since tired, or, to his mind, settled down. But still he finds solace in these paper bricks that line the walls, as if they were holding up the roof.

After he dresses he goes to the kitchen, makes himself a cup of tea and sits down to read the paper. Assorted objects - gifts and souvenirs given to him by his clients over the years - are strewn around the kitchen. Above the small, square table hangs a framed print of Bonnard's Table Set in a Garden, a gift from a former client, a borderline cellist who appeared on his lawn one night and set her hair on fire. You're a cockroach, she yelled at him then, a cockroach. I I step on you, you'll be squashed. He likes to stare at the picture: a table set among the trees, one chair, a bottle of wine, and yellow light spilling through the branches, startlingly alive.

So, what do you think? Read it soon or give it away?

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