Tag Archives: happiness

A Thing I Look Forward to All Year

Posted on by
4

This Sunday will be the Epiphany service at the Methodist church the next town over. “Lessons and Carols” is a collection of just about every musician for three counties ’round packing out the big, beautiful, Norman-esque Norton church to do Christmas music. (No, the Normans didn’t reach Wise County in the Middle Ages, but some architects apparently sent missionaries.)

I look forward to this event–held the third Sunday in January–all year. Maybe it’s because it comes after the crush is over; most of the tinsel and glitter are out of the floorboard cracks; lawn decorations sit in boxes at the base of attic stairs. It’s January: cold, bleak, emotionally exhausted and financially drained January. We may as well sing together as face Winter alone.

And there’s just something about Christmas carols, when you don’t have to think about all the other stuff surrounding the holidays, that goes straight into your veins. When you can really hear them, their messages are exhilarating.

Musicians dust off sheet music and embrace hastily-cobbled partnerships–bluegrass trio, classical harpist, brass ensemble, unaccompanied folk singers and all. The music at Lessons and Carols doesn’t change much. Sometimes the strolling guitar team does Joy to the World instead of God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen. The violin quartet moves between Handel and Mendelssohn.  There aren’t many surprises.

So few that, in the four years Jack and I have been singing at this event, I’ve developed trigger points. When our neighbor David–his wife Heather works at our store and he heads the college music department–leads his choir into Little Drummer Boy, no matter how I steel myself, I go to mush. The thrumming, sobbing, opening bass notes, followed by all those black-clad quiet voices in blended harmony, “Come, they told me….”

A little boy soprano always sings the first verse of Once in Royal David’s City, before the congregation joins in. One pure small voice soaring through that high-ceilinged church, then everyone rumbling forward more-or-less together with “Jesus is our childhood pattern….”

I’ve learned to wear something with pockets and pack them with tissues.

Jack wonders why I like this event so much.  Musically,  it’s all over the place. It’s predictable, and long–now grown to two and a half hours PLUS prelude music. The benches are uncomfortable. We even do that hackneyed candle thing with the lights out.

Ah, but “come, they told me…..”

Pottering Happily About

Posted on by
3

This morning I woke up at home, next to Jack, with two cats piled atop me and a dog jackknifed against my knees. Crooked sleep under my own duvet…. {blissful sigh}.

Shopsitter Andrew’s parents arrived unexpectedly last night–you should have seen that lad’s face–so we gave him the day off to run about and see the bright light of Wise County. (There’s a new traffic light on the four-lane.)

Jack had prison visits this morning with the Quaker ministry, so that left me in the bookstore with its pristine shelves Andrew’s been sorting day by day, and some odd jobs we never bothered to show him because they don’t come up that often.

With gusto, I tied my hair back and tackled the list: rolling coins from the change drawer; investigating the odd smell coming from one corner of the mystery room (an air freshener had fallen behind a shelf and gone septic); gathering all the odds and ends of crackers and cookies into the bread tin. Jack and I live above the shop, so one half of our downstairs kitchen is bookstore, the other half functioning as a staff room with fridge and microwave. Imagine if the public could see your staff room. :[

In short, I reveled in the quiet pottering of a nesting bird, re-establishing herself on home turf. Bookstore, sweet bookstore, and it’s all mine–well, mine and Jack’s, and now part Andrew’s too, bless the boy. (He’s 27; I’m only calling him a boy for poetic purposes.)

One of the things people have asked about, on the book tour, is what it’s like to own a bookshop. Over and over again I found myself describing a theme that recurs in the book and in our lives: not renting inside one’s own skin. The bookstores we are visiting are independent ones, like ours, for the most part. They don’t have corporate manuals that tell you how things are done. The problems, the challenges, running out of shelf space and trying to find a way to categorize a particular book and figuring out the best use of your limited wall display area, etc.: all these belong to you.

Sometimes I wonder if Americans are taught to despise smallness, not intentionally, just in the daily messages we absorb. We’re encouraged to lead big, “Madmen” kind of lives, vying for the top of the food chain, ladder, whatever.

But let me tell you, there is nothing like rolling the change you collected one customer at a time, from people whose names and reading tastes you know, and putting their dirty coffee cups in the dishwasher after they’ve left, in the bookstore you own. Living large comes in many forms, and some lives– like the Tardises of Dr. Who fame– are larger inside than they appear at a glance.
My day is passing in a contented haze of small chores that will keep our shop cozy and functional.

It don’t get no better’n this.