The Foreign Service Journal, January 2005

36 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / J A N U A R Y 2 0 0 5 F O C U S O N R E F L E C T I O N S U NPACKING M Y B OOKS he movers are gone and the new house, not yet a home, is like Humpty- Dumpty waiting to be put back together again. My God, where do we begin?! An inveterate practitioner of pro- crastination, I (for one) turn to a ritual that I always look forward to: the unpacking of my books from boxes. I’ve been doing it every two or three years since well before I joined the Foreign Service more than a decade ago. Each time, I seem to get sidetracked from my orderly plan, picking up one book and then another, leafing random- ly through certain half-forgotten pages, sometimes with a surge of recognition or a twinge of nostalgia at the sudden T A N FSO SORTS THROUGH HIS BAGGAGE , LITERALLY AND FIGURATIVELY . B Y A LEXIS L UDWIG Jim Nuttle