Category Archives: small town USA

My Grandmother, What Big….

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Weep and wail, you procrastinators. Our last trilogy of 50 Shades of Grey has left the bookstore. It went out in a brown paper bag inside a recycled “Books a Million” polystyrene bag. And the buyer—who of course was purchasing it for her grandmother, not herself—was careful to let no one observe her.

In fact, when “Liv” came into the bookstore during Christmas vacation from university, she walked straight to the trilogy’s star place on the “holiday specials” shelf and plucked them up. “I knew these would still be here,” she grinned. “This town’s too small for anyone to buy them from people they know.”

How right she was. ‘Tis the curse of a small town bookshop that one cannot sell books on addiction or copies of the Kama Sutra to customers one knows by name—and goes to church with, or attends the annual gala at the college with, or otherwise could make a lot of trouble for if one were to start naming titles. We swear ourselves to secrecy, but it matters not; people don’t buy “iffy” titles from us unless we don’t know who they (the customers) are.

But we were startled that young Liv, an intelligent, self-confident young woman who’d worked the shop for us many times during her high school summers, wanted the Shades of Grey trilogy.

“No, no,” she said, waving the paper bag concealing them in negation. “My grandmother wanted to read them, and I told her I knew where I could get them without anyone knowing, and that I’d do it for her for a late Christmas present.”

For her grandmother. Of course. We tried to shake her, but she stuck to this story, repeating it several times over our shared cup of tea and general catch-up in village gossip. Which included lots of names, but no titles.

And for those of you who hesitated to enter the bookshop and carry away these treasures of grammatical insight—sorry, I meant anatomical—please be advised that we don’t plan to restock those…books.

 

Two countries separated by a common language

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Jack blogs about language woes

I’m really not good at remembering names of customers (and not much better at faces). So I have a fall-back position of asking anyone who comes in if they have been in before or if they are looking for anything in particular. That’s when my secret weapon comes into play – my Scottish brogue! It usually produces exclamations of delight in return, people asking where I’m from, saying their great-grandfather came over from Scotland–although not always. Sometimes it results in blank looks or very confused responses, like “Hunh?”

It took a while before I was able to work out what was wrong, but finally the penny dropped. It wasn’t the accent so much as the vocabulary.

I frequently say that it’s a pity the Founding Fathers didn’t stipulate that everyone in the US would speak Sioux or Cherokee or another indigenous language. That way anyone coming here from the UK would realize that they’re in a foreign country and not assume that they understand the locals (or vice-versa). For instance I used to say, “The book you just ordered will be here within a fortnight.” The customer would stare, then mumble, “so – my books will be here in four nights? Could I pick them up the next morning?”

It seemed that writing the date of delivery would be easiest, until I realized that in the UK, we write the day first, and it is month first in the US. Still, this did clear up why my church kept singing Happy Birthday to me on May 2nd instead of February 5th.

A wee antiques shop lies not far from our bookstore, and people often ask how to find it. Directing someone to “turn right at the bottom of the steps and walk a hundred yards up the pavement” garnered funny looks as well. In the UK the sidewalk is called the pavement and the pavement is the road.

Then there is the issue of the fresh shortbread I make; I once extended a plate to a woman with the invitation, “Care for a biscuit?” She looked very suspicious.

But not as suspicious as the lady whose phone number I was writing down last week. When I misheard her, I found the eraser didn’t work. So I said, “Oh, one moment, madam, my rubber is malfunctioning.”

She hasn’t been back since, that woman.