Category Archives: Big Stone Gap

Satsu Issues an Apology

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satsuGood Morning Everyone! My name is Satsu and I’m temping here at The Little Bookstore until March 11. Then I’m moving to DC to pick up some more admin work there.

I’ve arrived in the nick of time here. They sure needed help. The fuzzy guy who runs the bookstore has been dealing with the loss of a personal friend, poor brave soul, plus he’s working three jobs – trying to get a class together for the College for Older Adults, run the bookshop, and renovate a room in Hazel House. (That’s the house he helps run for rescue cats, sweet boy.)

They tell me there’s a lady who works here with the fuzzy guy, but I’ve not seen her – unless she’s that flash of cotton fabrics and hair that whirls through the place about once a week. Someone came in the other day, dropped a suitcase, picked up a suitcase, and left again. That may have been her.

I’m told she just turned in a manuscript for her third book, which is about foster care and adoption. Naturally I assumed it was about cats, but no, it’s human children and social workers and foster care parents, all talking about their experiences. Whatever it was, getting it done on time kept her from putting up any other blogs this week. She left a phone message asking if I could write something, and I’m happy to earn my keep here.

There are just a few temps like me here right now. Four of us started together, but two of the younger girls went out the door a few days later, adopted to forever families. It’s always the cute young ones who go first.

But no worries. Me and this plump older tabby named Nancy Drew, we’re headed out next week, gonna go live in the Big City. I don’t know about Nancy – her goals in life seem to be “Move as little as possible, eat as much as possible” – but me I’m looking forward to life in the fast lane. Papers to pee on, files to eat, online documents to destroy with keyboard crossing – oh, I can’t wait to get started!

So if you were expecting to hear from Fuzzy Guy or Whirling Lady, please be assured they’ll get back in touch next week. I think. He’s up to his ears in faucets and pipes and she’s off someplace doing something for her parents. She’ll be back. Fuzzy Guy is expecting her to help him hold some pipes in place.

Hasta la vista, babes!

A Different Kind of Porn – Nope.

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doily-coatJack and I did some shelf rearranging this week, to aid me in my final week of book edits avoidance therapy. The adjustments meant losing about half a bookshelf’s worth of space, so I started looking at our diet and exercise, aging, and women’s health books.

And got really, really angry. So many books about how women can keep themselves from looking older – not being older, not keeping themselves well, just not LOOKING older. So many books on what to wear after fifty. So many books on how to be skinny – not healthy, skinny.

When Jack and I opened our bookstore, we got some books in from Playboy. We discussed whether to sell “porn,” and decided we’d go with a simple definition: if we felt like the books would harm our friends Teri and Gary’s three daughters (at the time ages 4-12, more or less) we wouldn’t sell them. (Teri is the one who traded us photocopies for free books when we first opened, for those who have read Little Bookstore.) That made it fairly easy to know what we felt comfortable selling.

So I applied the same rule to these “women’s health” books, and threw away 200 of them. Because if the girls had lived by their rules, they would have been beat down, joyless consumerists. Peh.

Here are the rules, Mollie, Maeve, and Millie: wear what makes you feel comfortable, sexy, happy, or powerful–whatever your moment or mood calls for. Put on make-up or don’t – and if you want to make your own we kept a few books on natural cosmetics and color choices for hair and skin tones. Be healthy, be that plump, skinny, middle of the road, or whatever else you and your doctor agree is working for you. Look after yourself mentally – don’t read books that try to tell you  how many of anything you should own. Don’t fall for the sale of fear.

And, as one of my favorite snark signs says, “Don’t try to keep up with the Joneses. That’s expensive. Drag them down to your level. It will make them happier, too.”

Enjoy life, girls. We are enjoying the extra space in our bookstore – gained a whole shelf of space by tossing the porn.