Tag Archives: Little Bookstore of Big Stone Gap

Eight Needleworkers, Seven Kittens, Two Camera Crews and a Bookstore in a Pear Tree

Posted on by
8

I really don’t know how we get ourselves into these situations. Last night a film crew came to the bookstore to film some promotional video about our shop and my book. They chose Tuesday evening because we have a weekly stitch-n-bitch in which the shop fills with lively, cheerful babes wielding long needles. VERY photogenic.

But the day before, we got a call from the animal rescue we work with: a family of shelters kitties’ number was up. Sure, of course, bring them over. Then St. Martin’s Press (my publisher) called: they needed a head shot of Jack and me together, by 11 pm. We called our friend Elissa, a pro photographer who promised to run by after work and shoot us. (You can see her massive body of work on Facebook: search for elp6n.)

That’s how two camera crews, eight Needleworking Babes, and seven identical grey fluffballs landed in our shop at more or less the same moment last night. It got a little crazy.  The kittens ran for yarn bundles and cubbyholes, mewing too loudly to leave out during the camera work. The camera crew busily set up lights larger than some of our shelves, as needleworkers ducked under and around them. Elissa had Jack and I backed against a shelf and was bracketing away. The women made boisterous jokes as they pulled out their yarn and eyed the huge camera–and the hunky cameraman. I glanced up from Elissa’s blinding flash at one point to see Tyler the Cameraman traversing the bookstore on his knees, arms extended to shepherd the septuplets into the mystery room. As he corralled errant kittens, Tyler said with a radiant smile, “This is so cool!”

The women, watching his butt wiggle across the floor, grinned too.

That’s when the door opened and a professor friend walked in, saying to someone behind him, “And you’ll love our town bookstore; it’s such a calm, elegant place.” Tyler’s backside was to her, and a kitten had just skittered past him–to be scooped up by a needlework babe, glass of wine in one hand, yarn in the other. The kitten promptly attacked the wineglass as Elissa’s camera did a rapid series of blue strobe lights in the newcomer’s face.

Witold, an academic friend featured in my book, often introduces the new professors in town to our shop as part of the community tour. He hadn’t called ahead. This was a miscalculation.

“Melanie” the new Spanish Professor watched the chaos with one raised eyebrow and a smile spread across her face like a shield. We broke from kitten-wrangling and photo ops to say hello and offer her a chair.

She waved a hand in negation. “No no, I can’t stay long, and I can see that you’re busy.”

I think her voice had an edge of panic to it.

So we got the kittens fed and enclosed and the film finished and the photos snapped and had a good time with the needleworkers, laughing and flirting and cutting up for the video. Everyone went home about 9:30. (We know how to party, but we’re old.)

And Witold sent me a text message: I asked Melanie her impression of the bookstore, and she said, “Surreal.”

Welcome aboard, Mel. Would you like a book, or a kitten?

Don’t forget to enter Caption Contest IV for a chance to win a free copy of “The Little Bookstore of Big Stone Gap.” Check the July 29 blog for the photo and current entries.

I Know Why the Cat Toy Sings

Posted on by
3

Jack and I foster shelter cats in our bookstore. It is a convenient place to offer potential adopters hands-on time. Right now we have three staff cats, plus two young’uns we’re sitting for a friend on holiday. A family of seven will arrive this afternoon: mom plus six infants whose last day at the shelter has come.

The woman who asked us to sit her cats gave us a boatload of Caternalia: kibble, litter, and a large plastic bag full of toys other animal lovers had donated. The toys include one of those rings with embedded balls, which has sent little Owen Meany (staff kitten) into paroxysms of joy for about 36 hours now.

Among the felt mice, plastic coils and little balls with bells sat a robin, looking innocuous enough. But when the bag moved, the robin sang. It took us a few tries to isolate the noisy toy and its annoyingly cheerful whistle.

Once we had, my wise husband walked to the trash can and opened the lid. Before he could consign the robin to its smelly grave, Val-kyttie, the Senior house animal, reached out and sniffed it, then batted Jack’s hand. Val-kyttie is seventeen, Scottish, senile, and Alpha Dog. No longer can she jump to her preferred bookshelf lounging point, so she stands at the bottom and meows until a human staffer lifts her. She eats soft cat food, sleeps eighteen hours a day (eight of them curled atop Jack’s head) and spends her waking shift being shop curmudgeon.

She’s not happy about the fostering. The first time we brought home a cat family down on its luck, she peed on all four bed pillows in one blast–something she’d never done before and hasn’t since. Internet advice says this signals “extreme anger issues.” We explained that she was herself a foundling who came to us at a mere four weeks of age, but despite her Quaker upbringing, Val-kyttie has not developed a sense of empathy.

She did acquire the singing robin toy, because there’s nothing like a little parental guilt to motivate otherwise sensible adults into doing things they know they’ll regret. Jack laid it on the floor so Val-kyttie could bat it with her paw–a Cheshire grin playing across her face. When she later meowed to be lifted, the robin waited next to her; as Jack reached down, she snatched it up in her mouth.

Even now she is lying, contented, on the shelf designated the “Shady Rest Home” porch, surveying her garden with the robin nestled between her paws. Every time she shifts position, it sings. Throughout the day customers looked about suspiciously at the mechanical twirping. Jack and I smiled and shrugged.

Jack said to me recently, “I don’t know how much longer this can last.” Just then Val-kyttie looked ’round with a placid smile and an almost friendly lash of her tail, and as the bird sang, she nuzzled it affectionately.

Jack sighed. “Never mind.”

And that, gentle readers, is why the uncaged bird sings. Revenge is tweet.