I was in Brooklyn over the weekend, spending a few lovely hours today with the book appraiser. Triple-teaming him, we were able to go through what my sister's friend thinks may have been 2-3,000 books (hard to imagine, but possible). The book appraiser is a professor with an absolute lust for most things printed.

If my sister's boyfriend hadn't kept him on task, he said he would have spent a few weeks in dad's dusty, increasingly empty study. Amazing. Of course, to him all of those books were enticing, not scary.

Although he didn't come from there, he fits right into New York-a smart man who reinvented himself in a city if you aren't eccentric, you don't fit in.

The experience of taking apart Dad's house, deconstructing his life's passions, has been sad and challenging. Not that you can reduce a person's life to the books accumulated for so many years.

However, there are a couple of benefits. The work of the appraisals has revealed what a fascinating town New York can be-and the complicated and very idiosyncratic men and women who live there.

Let's not even mention those who were actually born in New York-and somehow escaped and roam the burbs!