Category Archives: bookstore management

“Yeah, That’s a Toilet”: the bookstore’s front yard, explained

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There are things in life I don’t understand. Folding underwear and landscaping are two of them. The return on time invested just seems …. small.IMG_4242

Jack and I decided last year that we’d had it with lawn care. We scavenged a bunch of old bricks from friends,  bought some ironwork statues, and when that didn’t cover the whole space, we paid a student who needed some grad school money to dig up the rest of the grass.

Voila: our place in the annals of Colorful Local Characters was secured.

Locals observing the bricks-and-statues procession described the work as “interesting” in a tone that implied this was not a compliment. When we ripped up the yard, “kooky” came into play–mostly whispered as doors closed behind us at social gatherings.IMG_4240

Bare earth offends? I’m not the world’s greatest conformist, but I bought three packages of “Perennials” –having first ascertained that, yes, these are the ones that come up every year and take care of themselves–and shook the packets out on the ground sometime late last summer.

Gosh darn if they didn’t come up this year and make the nicest collection of flowers and leaves and stuff. Amazing thing, this gardening trick.

I come from a long line of brown thumb women. I once managed to kill a spider plant. Still, lazy landscaping has its rewards. Last year when friends and I made book planters from some old tomes here, we had a few plants leftover I couldn’t figure out what to do with. I took them outside and set them down in a rainstorm (so I wouldn’t have to water them) and kinda forgot they were out there. Next time I looked, well, I thought they were dead, so just left them there for cruel winter to wipe out the remains.

IMG_4241Now they’re growing like the weeds they aren’t, studding the yard with gorgeous deep purple.

We let the clover and the other natural ground covers grow alongside the hostas we transplanted from the back on the advice of a friend (“Line your sidewalk with them and they look spiffy without care”) and the lilac and the azalea someone gave me for my birthday, all stuck out there in various nooks and crannies where we figured they’d cover our mowing sins. My idea of gardening is less cultivation that containment: mint, chives, sorrel, ivy. Let it grow. I’d rather hack than weed.

And as Jack and I sit on our front porch, sipping summer concoctions while listening to the drone of mower motors in the distance, we clink glasses and sip.

Eulis

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Yesterday a friend came by and said her husband was at the funeral parlor, one of his friends from the Mutual breakfast gang had died. The Mutual is the diner that time decided to ignore. Two eggs and coffee with toast are $2.50, and the booths are dark fake wood Formica. The staff are cheerfully surly and the regulars are mostly retired guys in seed caps.

Jack is a regular (but he wears a flat cap) so of course we were startled, and asked in unison, “WHO?”

Eulis was a Korean War Veteran, a long haul truck driver (as was his son after him) a loving husband and an attentive father. He made trips with his son John until about 3 months before the last stroke laid him low. Eulis was the only guy I ever knew who swore coffee tasted different in Styrofoam cups than in ceramic mugs.

Over the years Eulis never said much to me beyond, “Waaalll, there she is; how’s Mrs. Jack today?” Sometimes he’d say, “You know, your husband’s a fine man, Missy, a fine man.” And I’d smile and agree.

Naturally, Jack loved Eulis.

As we measured out our lives with Mutual coffee spoons, we watched Eulis walk tall and proud, then with a hearing aid, then a cane, and finally a slow, booth-to-booth shuffle, stopping to regain his balance with a hand clamped to each seat back.

His wife Annie was brilliant. “That the best you can do?” she’d goad him when he slumped or rested over-long. Annie used to be a nurse. She’d been married to Eulis many years, and she knew how to keep him standing to the very end. He was a proud man.

And a fixture to us, here in the community. Eulis was as much a part of Mutual mornings as the chipped ceramic mugs he drank from. His cap with the “Korean Veteran” lettering. His wire frame glasses. His quiet, tall presence.

About two months ago a mutual (Mutual) acquaintance came by the shop and said, “Wendy, you know who’d make a really good book? Eulis. He’s got some life story. And he’s such a nice guy. You should go talk to him. I think he’d do it.”

“Sure,” I said, my mind going to the slow shuffle I’d last seen him doing. Step. Hand clamp. Rest. Shift. Step. Annie behind him all the way, holding him up with her careful, aimed teasing. I resolved to find time soon.

There’s an African proverb that says, “When an old person dies, a library burns.”

In his obituary, Eulis made all his fellow coffee drinkers from the Mutual honorary pallbearers.