Author Archives: wendywelch

Pottering Happily About

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This morning I woke up at home, next to Jack, with two cats piled atop me and a dog jackknifed against my knees. Crooked sleep under my own duvet…. {blissful sigh}.

Shopsitter Andrew’s parents arrived unexpectedly last night–you should have seen that lad’s face–so we gave him the day off to run about and see the bright light of Wise County. (There’s a new traffic light on the four-lane.)

Jack had prison visits this morning with the Quaker ministry, so that left me in the bookstore with its pristine shelves Andrew’s been sorting day by day, and some odd jobs we never bothered to show him because they don’t come up that often.

With gusto, I tied my hair back and tackled the list: rolling coins from the change drawer; investigating the odd smell coming from one corner of the mystery room (an air freshener had fallen behind a shelf and gone septic); gathering all the odds and ends of crackers and cookies into the bread tin. Jack and I live above the shop, so one half of our downstairs kitchen is bookstore, the other half functioning as a staff room with fridge and microwave. Imagine if the public could see your staff room. :[

In short, I reveled in the quiet pottering of a nesting bird, re-establishing herself on home turf. Bookstore, sweet bookstore, and it’s all mine–well, mine and Jack’s, and now part Andrew’s too, bless the boy. (He’s 27; I’m only calling him a boy for poetic purposes.)

One of the things people have asked about, on the book tour, is what it’s like to own a bookshop. Over and over again I found myself describing a theme that recurs in the book and in our lives: not renting inside one’s own skin. The bookstores we are visiting are independent ones, like ours, for the most part. They don’t have corporate manuals that tell you how things are done. The problems, the challenges, running out of shelf space and trying to find a way to categorize a particular book and figuring out the best use of your limited wall display area, etc.: all these belong to you.

Sometimes I wonder if Americans are taught to despise smallness, not intentionally, just in the daily messages we absorb. We’re encouraged to lead big, “Madmen” kind of lives, vying for the top of the food chain, ladder, whatever.

But let me tell you, there is nothing like rolling the change you collected one customer at a time, from people whose names and reading tastes you know, and putting their dirty coffee cups in the dishwasher after they’ve left, in the bookstore you own. Living large comes in many forms, and some lives– like the Tardises of Dr. Who fame– are larger inside than they appear at a glance.
My day is passing in a contented haze of small chores that will keep our shop cozy and functional.

It don’t get no better’n this.

 

 

After the Fire, the Judgment

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Watching the NYC devastation, we tremble at what people lost. At least 20 lost their lives. Some must have lost pets. Many lost homes, perhaps as many as 100.

And then there’s the books.

Like the controversy over the marathon–to run or not to run, to devote resources or divert them–priorities get freely judged after a disaster. What you want, and why you want it, is up for grabs and questioning by everyone around you. You want to run a marathon? Are you nuts, or just selfish?

But for the people who got their families (skin and fur) out safely, it’s heartbreaking to think about what they’re thinking about, even if they won’t say so out loud for fear of judgment. From working here at the bookstore, as well as past work with the Red Cross, I’d say they’re thinking about the place on the stairs where they hung the mistletoe. They’re thinking about their baseball card collection. And they’re thinking about their books.

One of the first things people tend to replace after a house fire–once they’re safe and have a roof and food–is a beloved childhood book. We’ve given to fire victims over the years  copies of The Tao of Pooh, Danny and the Dinosaur, Heidi, a couple of Louis L’Amours and countless coloring books. (We have a policy that each such person gets one free book. Then about two years ago someone donated 200 coloring books, each with one or two pages used, so we started handing them out by the armload to parents of fire families; there’s not much for kids to do in motel rooms and the Red Cross couldn’t take them because they were used.)

Fairly often people get embarrassed when they start talking about their material losses. They sigh over signed baseballs, the high school portrait of their mom, a crystal punch bowl; everyone’s got a trigger. Then they give a strangled laugh and say, “It’s just stuff. It doesn’t matter.”

In the grand scheme, everyone knows that. But the objects of our affection are surprisingly deeply embedded–and usually carry more weight than just their size. You remember a book as much for how it made you feel, where you sat when you first read it, what was happening to you at that time, as for what it said. You can replace the words, you can recreate the memories, but you can’t reinvent that your grandmother’s hands held that Fanny Farmer cookbook, and this one is a copy.

Which sucks.

Evaluating layers of loss, seeking to restore, a need for normalcy and legacy–isn’t that all part of being human? As is trying to outrun our need to have them in the first place.

But had it gone on, would those marathoners have been able to outrun themselves?