Author Archives: wendywelch

The Ozarks are odd–in a charming, fun sort of way, of course

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How can I put this? The Ozarks are odd.

We pulled into Springfield last night and had a nice dinner with an old friend from Newfoundland days, who with minimal arm twisting agreed to meet us this morning and spend the day marauding through  bookstores. Rae met us at 9:30 a.m.  (a sacrifice for her, believe me) and we set off.

Rae's car was much admired as we journeyed.

And promptly ran into our first unfriendly bookstore manager. When I arrived at the typical-strip-mall location we were expecting the usual encounter of unusualness. To explain, about half to 60% of the bookstores we have visited are named Book Rack/Corner/Palace/Exchange and are 25,000 or so paperbacks tucked onto homemade shelving in a strip mall.

GOOD FOR YOU! we say, and since these places are usually staffed by the owner, we know their uniqueness lies not in what they offer or how they offer it, but in who is doing the selling. It’s part of the bookstore charm that owners tend to be colorful local characters, or sweethearts who just missed getting a social work degree, etc. We haven’t met two alike yet.

We bagged our first curmudgeon in this Missouri strip mall. Being the first, he seemed utterly charming, like gathering around the cage and going, “Oh, look! He’s doing it again!” when a gorilla flings poo.  Jack talked with the lad a bit longer than I did, since his Scots accent breaks down defenses, and by the time we left we knew that Cur (who was not that bad, as mudges go) and his family owned the store, they’d been there 20 years, and there were three other used bookstores in town, one run by a “real jerk,” and one by “Mr. Used Books; he wrote a book about running used bookstores, like 30 years ago.” (My ears pricked up.)

Warming to my husband, Mr. Personality also told us about “the secret store.” Apparently, if you are a good little customer and read all your classics, the community will let you in on an unmarked shop at the corner of a busy intersection. The store is in an industrial location and has no sign, but the faithful few know where to find “The Book Jungle.”

See, there’s no other way to put it: the Ozarks are odd. Charming, and fun, but odd. As we left that store, I said to Rae, “Wow. We’ve never met an anti-social used book store owner before. That’s really rare.”

Her bemused, one-raised-eyebrow look should have warned me, but we arrived at the second store convinced Cur was a one-off. At the door we were greeted by a sign that said, “No, we don’t have a customer bathroom. So don’t ask.”

It was the only greeting we got. Rae’s eyebrow made ever more sense as we shopped. Although spacious, this store boasted no overstuffed armchairs, no cozy corners, no warm lamps for reading. Another sign on the back wall said something to the effect of, “Put it back where you found it. If you can’t, why are shopping in a bookstore in the first place?” I nudged Jack. “Let’s get out of here.”

The college kid working with the owner couldn’t have cared less about our bookstore in Virginia, and we started to leave, but the owner looked up and said, “Where in Virginia? Never heard of that.”

We spent 15 minutes making bookstore small talk, and he warmed up enough to show us his $1,000 signed first edition of SE Hinton’s The Outsiders. As we left the store, Rae said, “That place has been here a long time. Now I know that he bought it six years ago, it’s starting to make sense. The personality of the store really changed then. Before, it was friendlier.”

Jack and I have often said, there are people who sell books because they’re books, and there are people who sell books because that’s what they ended up selling.

Okay, two weird bookstores in rapid succession. Now we’d had our quota.

Welcome to Redeemed, our first ever second-hand book dealer for Christians only. Redeemed, to be honest, was well organized and not leaning specifically to the “only Republicans are Christians” attitude we’d seen rather broadly displayed since reaching Springfield. Rae and I, folklorists to our cores, had already talked Jack’s ears off discussing which was the buckle of the Bible belt: Appalachia or the Ozarks. And I have to concede this point of honor to the Ozarks. I thought I’d seen a lot of “God is a white American who spends his weekends hunting” displayed in Appalachia, but we’ve got nothing on this town.

(Caveat the second: let me establish where on the mast my colors are nailed. In essence, I would die before giving up being a Christian, but I wouldn’t kill anyone over anything to do with any religion, period. If you ask me what being a Christian means, it comes down to He really was God’s Son; She really was a Virgin; It really was a Whale; and if you start the hymn, you must sing all four verses. After that, I’m flexible. I do, however, doubt very much that God is a white, English-speaking male.)

So lest you think I’m making fun of something that is the underpinning value of my life, we liked Redeemed just fine as a bookstore. Our big question was, how would a Christian bookstore decide which books to stock? They had a small classics section, in which Madame Bovary appeared, but not Dracula, Brideshead Revisited or Tom Jones. Was this happenstance? Sarah Palin’s books had pride of place in politics, but Barak Obama’s Audacity of Hope appeared on the shelf as well.

How would one run a bookstore based on an interpretation so specific to the shopkeeper’s personal beliefs? This was an interesting question for us. I’ve often said that, if you turn a book shop owner’s heart inside out, what you get is the shop. It’s a display of who and what the person is. Earlier in the trip, Joe’s shop was as messy and free-spirited as a VW bus parked at Woodstock, Joyce’s as neatly executed as a cross stitch pattern. The one TN shop we hadn’t liked sported low lighting and high prices, and once you met the owner, you knew it for a shyster’s dream. A Christian bookstore would be so hard to define, then to defend from its own clientele. How would one do it?

We would never know because the staff were too busy for us to feel comfortable approaching anyone; the place brimmed with people bringing in trade volumes–which made us think with a pang of our baby, back in Big Stone being looked after by the student Edward. The week after Christmas has traditionally been a time when people clean out closets, and we wondered if our back room were already impassible with this year’s dredgings.

Never mind; we have a week left and we’re going to live in the moment! Out of Redeemed’s parking lot we went, on to that secret location for The Book Jungle.

Oi vey. Now we know. Odd is Ozark normal.

This rat maze of a bookstore, with the lowest lighting I’d ever not been able to see in, was literally the size of our hotel room. Yet he must have had 20,000 books stuck in there – very neatly organized, too. If this shop had been a man, it would have buttoned the top button of its collar, not spoken unless spoken to, and known the exact distance to Mars, when the first silent film appeared in America, and how to get out if trapped in an underwater car.

Which pretty much sums up the owner, a man whose name we never got. Our conversation with him consisted of amiable fishhooks tossed out on our side (“Wow! You been here long?”) and grunts on his.

His prices were low – too low for him to have been using a computer. Had we been buying for our own shop, we could have scored big time, but we contented ourselves with a few real finds. It felt too much like taking candy from a surly infant.

Lunch with a couple of Rae’s college friends, and a final bookstore stop: ABC Books. Okay, put the cherry on the icing of the Odd cake: this was a secondhand bookstore where the front was Christian, the back full of paranormals and how-tos. And this shop did display personality, right next to the canners and the “how to survive when the electricity fails” pamphlets published by the owner. And advertisements for “Survival Series” shooting courses, tailored to “never shot before” wives and children.

I looked at Rae, a Missouri native. She grinned. “Welcome to the Ozarks.”

We bought a couple of fun titles there, and I look forward to planting my edible front yard when we get home.

On the 1st day after Christmas, my true love said to me….

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Christmas Day tucked into a quiet, well-appointed hotel can be very contemplative. We found the local Quaker gathering and joined them for meeting, celebrating Jesus’ birth and all it has meant for the rest of us. From contemplation to human bliss, an Indian restaurant near the hotel opened for the evening meal. Jack turned to me in the middle of his shrimp bhuna and said with a beatific smile, “It doesn’t get any better than this.”

It didn’t Dec. 26, anyway. The rain, sensing we would be returning to our car for what was marked as a scenic drive through the Ozarks, returned with vigor. Also, Monday is a day when many  bookshops are closed, and the day after Christmas a lot of small retailers pretty much think “forget it.” (We have never found this wise, knowing that Christmas money is burning a hole in many bibliophilic pockets.)

So here is the list of bookstores we did NOT get to visit: That Bookstore in Blytheville (yes, that’s the actual name, and I was looking forward to that one because it’s famous for being in the middle of nowhere yet attracting EVERYONE in the lit community); Xanadu Books in Memphis itself; and one each in Pocahontas, Mountain Home and Batesville, Arkansas.

The one we did get to surprised us. “Wolf Books” in Jonesboro, AR sounded like your basic second-hand store, but turned out to be a textbook buy-back. We’d been avoiding textbook traders and Christian bookstores on this trip because the former don’t usually deal in other forms, while the latter rarely focus on books; they’re more like Hallmark shops full of cards and trinkets. We wish both well, and bypass them with smiles.

Since we walked into Wolf (the local mascot) Books before we realized what it was, and since the guy behind the counter pounced on us as though we were the only humans he’d seen in days (which may have been true; no one came in during the half hour we spent with him) Jack just bit the bullet and explained that we ran a used bookstore, had misunderstood the name, we were very sorry and would be going now.

Not so fast. Bobby, the energetic and charismatic co-owner of the shop, hauled us over to his office, gave us  a card and a complimentary ink pen, grilled us about our shop, and explained that he bought used textbooks from across the States at pretty much the same prices as online dealers so he could resell them in his shop, and he’d love to sell ours for us.

“I make it against the online thing because I get customers all their stuff at once, conveniently bundled so they don’t have to think, and I do it fast. It’s all about service in this online world,” he said. We heartily agreed, having found that in the little shops sprinkled along the high- and byways, people survive the Amazon massacre because they are quirky, homely, sensitive HUMAN individuals who treat the people in their shops with respect AND make shopping convenient for them.

The funny thing was, though, for Bobby, service meant speed. For the rest of the used book world, it meant relaxation. We bliss our customers out whenever possible, giving them coffee, encouraging them to sit and read, meander the rooms, strike up conversations. And so do most of our cousins in the biz.

In fact, when we had to find an open Wal-Mart recently because we needed a piece of electronic equipment and didn’t know what small shop might sell it, we experienced culture shock. I forgot where we were and spoke to the cashier as though she and I were both humans with something in common. She stared at me, answered politely, and rang us up faster, as if in fear. We were out of there in two minutes, our purchase in a plastic bag bearing a corporate logo.

“Was that… weird?” I asked Jack as we walked through the crowded lot.

“Not for Wal-Mart; we’re just not used to it anymore. If you stay away awhile, what it really is shows up again.”

Not to stretch a point, but Jack’s observation has an echo in my love-hate affair with hotel TV. Jack and I don’t have a TV at our house, just Netflix. So when we land in a hotel room, I often do a channel surf for “good regular shows.” And there never are any. If you’re not hooked on a show from its inception, the paper thin nature of the characters, the amazing leaps of logic to resolve a crime in 42 minutes, the preachy attitudes of the heroes no matter how many sides a story could have in real life: they’re pretty easy to spot. Jack says, each time I pick up the remote, “Hope springs eternal, eh?” But I usually wind up spending 2o minutes watching one minute on each channel, then click off. It’s more or less a ritual by now. It’s not that I’m anti-TV; I just want a REAL story.

Points to ponder. Are we so inured to certain things in life that we don’t realize we’re not enjoying them until we forgo them awhile?

I did say that our Christmas turned out contemplative.

Enough pontificating: back to the road! Jonesboro seemed a likely place to find a mom-and-pop lunch counter slinging up all-day breakfast (Jack’s second favorite meal) but we drove in endless circles looking for anything unaffiliated with a chain before finding “The Country Lunch Buffet.”

Suckers, we were. A chain like the Steak and Sirloin places near 0ur home in VA, it was set up to look like an independent, the way coffeehouses often have individualistic names but are owned by a conglomerate.

Never mind; the food was good, plenty of green vegetables in evidence next to the beloved orange breaded foods of the South, AND we got a delightful surprise. My cell phone rang and Rachel Gholson, a friend from doctoral student days in Newfoundland, was calling from Springfield, MO. Were we headed that way?

Indeed we were, and we hastened our driving, since 1) Rachel was meeting us for supper; 2) the rain had become a deluge; and 3) Highway 60 is duller than red clay dirt. (Sorry, AR Tourism Board, but you should take those little scenic dotted lines off the map.)

We did stop in Hardy, AR, on advice from our friend Joyce Rowland. Most of it was shut, but we found two important things: cashews and a bathroom, both of which enhanced the pleasure of our onward drive. We also found that Sparrow’s Nest Books, which we had looked forward to, was closed {sigh}. In fact, the drive only became bearable because Jack kept his promise and hauled out the mini disc recorder to record the misadventures of his band Heritage (a Scottish folk supergroup in the 1980s). I’m going to work on writing them up this year. He had us laughing all the way.

Over supper with Rachel it was fairly easy to convince her to join us for a book invasion of Springfield tomorrow (possibly with our mutual friend Julie Henigan–three folklorist females and Jack in a car; friends please be prepared to stand bail).

For a very modest sum, we tucked up in a Days Inn close to the Cajun restaurant where we’d supped with Rachel, and OH BLISS it had an indoor pool. I’ve been trying to use hotel exercise rooms when available, but I really am a water baby, not a treadmill reader. (I keep dropping the book; I suppose the repeated negotiation of bending while walking is good for my tummy bulge. We got some very nice cheesecakes from our friend Elissa Powers back in Big Stone Gap, and we’ve kinda been nibbling those in the car….) Usually hotel pools are full of children emitting fluids (crying or…) but this one was gloriously empty. Jack sat with his book while I did cheesecake-negating laps.

Jack was right. It doesn’t get much better than this!