Category Archives: bookstore management

♪ Sometimes People can be Mean ♪

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The Health Department came for their 30-days-after-opening inspection yesterday. The gentleman who conducts these visits is a true gentleman, supportive, honest, forthcoming with answers to questions and with information newbies might not even know they need to ask for.

During the course of the visit, he told our chef Kelley there had been “a complaint” that our facility did not have the capacity to undertake all it was doing.

Huh – you’d think we’d have noticed if we were incompetent. Yet even as my dander began to rise, a customer eating in the cafe smiled and said, “Being translated, someone’s pissed off that this place has been such a success from the word go.” Everyone laughed.

And that was that. The health department gentleman investigated and found groundless the “you’re not smart enough to do what you’re doing” complaint, and business went on as usual.

But it really got to Kelley: “Why would someone want to mess with someone else’s livelihood without rhyme or reason? Why would they complain about ‘capacity,’ or are they just being mean? Don’t they understand the consequences for others?”

That’s a good question, and I’m not asking it specifically about us, but about that human proclivity overall to interfere with each other in a negative way–often involving lawyers and state agencies, but also gossip, fists, and sometimes churches. Do people take such negative approaches because they see a need to “protect” others? Because they feel a sense of power they want to exert, or because they feel powerless and want to get to feel powerful? Or just pure flying sparks of human meanness and not enough impulse control?

No one will ever know. I’m reminded of the episode of the old TV sitcom Murphy Brown, some 20 years ago, when she was invited as a guest onto a children’s television program “Mulberry Lane” (yes, it was a send-up of Sesame Street). Her visit went horribly wrong, resulting in the puppets singing a song about mean people, and how you should just get on with your lives and leave them to their sadness.

I sang it for Kelley: Sometimes people can be mean, ’cause they’re jealous or mad or excited. And then we went back to work, living our lives, running the cafe and bookstore, being happy people with successful businesses upstairs and down.

♪ Sometimes people can be mean ♪ Just close your ears and walk away ♪

The Monday Book: MUD SEASON, by Ellen Stimson

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It’s a new era for this blog—well, not that new, but still. In celebration of passing 100K hits, I’m instigating THE MONDAY BOOK.

The first one was given me by Pamela, my agent. She met our train on our trip to NYC earlier this month with a book in her arms. Since our train was late, I asked her if she’d been enjoying it, and she grinned.

“Actually, this is for you.” She handed over Mud Season, by Ellen Stimson, published by Countryman Press. “I begged it off an agent friend, because it’s the antimatter version of Little Bookstore. This family moved to Vermont to get a quieter life, and it all went horribly wrong. Enjoy.”

You know the quote, I think in Catcher in the Rye, where Holden Caulfield says he sometimes wishes he could have lunch with the author of a book? That’s how I felt about Mud Season. Stimson is a successful entrepreneur, someone who has run various businesses well, selling them off for profits. But when she moved to Vermont, she kinda got stuck behind her business acumen, didn’t take local knowledge and expectation into account, and wound up pretty close to literally losing the farm (house).

For all that the premise sounds scary and not that fun, the stories are hysterical in and of themselves, and Stimson’s writing style is funny, funny, funny. She uses footnotes to deliver comedic timing–a better use for them than Academia ever found.

Her family moved to “the country” to get out of the rat race, and found once there that they might more or less be considered the rats. As they try increasingly clumsy attempts to save themselves, their Horribly Quaint Country Store (HQCS) fails slowly, steadily, and for reasons that have a lot to do with them not being from there—although that gas pump thing on page 142 really was not their fault. This comedy of errors has some life lessons floating below the surface, but they are less extracted and analyzed then left for the reader to find between the lines.

Which made me really enjoy the book. I’d love to have lunch with Ellen Stimson and trade stories on running a business, writing a book about running said business, and why “idyllic” will never cross either of our lips again when describing a rural lifestyle. Meanwhile, I’ll enjoy re-reading my favorite parts: the parade permit that wasted 300 pounds of lobster;  the day she forgot the historical society was taking a house tour and started cleaning the chicken coup; and yes, the Gas Pump Incident. (Read it and weep with laughter.)

That parade permit chapter, for anyone who has ever lived in a small town, is about the funniest thing on record describing what this “simple” local government activity is like. See Big Stone Celtic’s page on Facebook. We go through this every year.

Next time I’m in Vermont (which will be the first time) I’ll look up Stimson, take her to lunch in a secluded place where no one can hear us, and compare notes. I suspect we will laugh ourselves into comas.