Tag Archives: independent bookstores

Everyone’s Special Space

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Our bookstore could not do without its cleaning lady, Heather. Heather has three important functions: keep long-term grime from accumulating; remove and regroup immediate clutter; and intimidate us into general tidiness that won’t slip below a certain level.

She performs each of these with dignity, grace, and humor. And the cats love her.

Heather and her husband David have two boys. Reese, their older son, is autistic. The family lives about four doors down the street, and once when David brought him in for a minute, Reese started one of those fits that all parents of special needs children dread. The one that looks like a tantrum but is a natural part of how this child is hardwired. The one that looks like bad parenting to people who can’t hear the music the family is dancing to.

Having spent a lot of my storytelling career working with special needs kids, I told David then, “Look, if you’re worried he’ll hurt himself or unlearn behavior you’ve been working on, that’s one thing. But if you’re afraid he’ll upset us, don’t worry.” That was years ago, but it’s created a space for Reese ever since.

reeseSo when the family got ready to lobby in DC for the March of Dimes campaign this year, Reese came to the bookstore to “practice” public etiquette. He was asked to ask before he touched knick-knacks, to stay away from the fridge and microwave–his two favorite bookstore items–and to sit down for a minute at a time. All of which he did well.

It’s hard for the Reeses of this world to get space for practicing, let alone just being. If you want to read a great article about “public space” and the autistic angle on “separate but equal,” Heather reposted one from the March 16 http://www.slate.com: “Where Should Special Needs Kids be Special? Tricky Questions about how to share Public Spaces.”

Meanwhile, Reese and the family are welcome anytime at our bookstore–and at Malaprop’s in Asheville, where the family surprised us by coming to a book talk I gave there. Reese did his signature bird tweets for most of the talk, and nobody in the audience minded a bit, because they’d been told ahead of time who Heather was and what Reese was likely to do.

It’s just one more reason to be proud of–and support–small independent bookstores, because we (as in community bookshops) get what the article author Amy Lutz said, “But what I keep coming back to is that community, by definition, is inclusive. Ideally, our public spaces should accommodate everyone.”

Amen, sister.

His White, Square Heart

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My 71-year-old husband built me a downstairs office. From a musty dugout basement lined with concrete he created white walls and a safe ceiling (no asbestos) plus a floor made of durable earth-friendly wood and windows that let in all the light a basement can get. He used bright-white materials so the light would be stronger.

He left the central wall’s original brickwork, even though he didn’t like it much, because he knows I think brickwork is cool and funky. He removed all the spiders he found because he has seen me run, shrieking in terror, from Daddy Long Legs.

It took him three months and something well above a thousand dollars, and he did it all himself—except when he had to determine which wires were live, which dead, running over the copper water pipes. For that he called in our friend X, a covert plumber here in town masquerading as a mine safety engineer. (X must not be outed; there aren’t many plumbers around here and his golf weekends would be crushed.)

Jack sealed cracks and underpinned flooring and shaved off door edges and cut special angles to cover protruding pipes. My husband did all that for me, because he wanted me to have a cozy space that I could call my own. Upstairs on the second floor, our private home is full of mind-grabbing, endless chores, while the bookstore is replete with people and noise and sales and inventory–not that we don’t like those things. They are the heartbeat of the bookstore.

But downstairs, with a comfy chair from a thrift store and a mantelpiece donated by a friend and an electric fire Jack hunted down on clearance, there’s a different kind of heartbeat. A quiet one. A steady one. An enduring one.

Jack said, out of the blue the other day as we doctored our respective morning coffees, “I built that space for you as comfortably and as carefully as I could, so you would have it forever.”

“I know,” I said, and kissed him on the cheek.

There are things couples don’t say, and then there are things couples don’t use words to say. When I sit downstairs in the white space that my husband’s hands created for me, I know, and he knows I know, that I’m sitting inside his heart. Cozy and warm, underpinning everything, letting the light in.