Enticing Wellness

I’ve been gone again a long time, but by the afternoon of the last day I posted I was felled again by the same bug I had originally. Most people seem to have a second phase, and some a third (oh please let it not be me!) which is actually worse than the first one. It’s also different from the first one. The only good part is that the food aversion was gone, so I was able to eat more and gain back some of the weight I lost. But the bad part is profound fatigue and an unrelenting cough which caused  my lower back to spasm. For two days I hobbled around like a little crone trapped in the skeleton of a bird. Now it’s gone from my lower back and I can walk, but it moved up to the middle of my back and is very uncomfortable to say the least.

I was thinking about this this morning as I wrapped orders. Orders – now there’s something interesting. I have uploaded absolutely nothing in days and days which meant sales slowed from a crawl to a halt until Saturday afternoon and evening when all hell broke loose. I sold three important books on ABE that I had planned to take to the fair, one other important one on my own site, one not as crucial book on ABE, and two not crucial at all ones on alibris. How can it be? I don’t know, but it can. They equaled a fair amount of money, so March ended up not being the worst month after all which is good I guess.

But as I was saying, I was thinking about all this this morning and my thoughts settled on my bookseller friend Linda. She was such a good seller – truly relished her work, obsessed as much as me over every package, and was totally in love with the books themselves. I speak of her in the past tense because I haven’t seen her since a year ago January when she temporarily went offline to have knee replacement surgery. She even made a deal with the doctor that she had to be able to go to the Case sale in May, but when May came to Cleveland that year Linda did not. How could it be? I’ve asked myself this so many times because it was truly unimaginable to me that someone who worked with the same intensity I do could just drop out of the game. But I think maybe after these past two weeks I finally get it.

First what happens is the world shrinks to the size of your house. And then to the size of one room. And then finally to the size of your body. Everything that is not that is peripheral and dispensable. You don’t care if orders fail to come in – in fact, you prefer they didn’t. You don’t care if new books fail to get to the mall and so when the weekend’s sales are ho-hum you expect it and it doesn’t even matter. I don’t mean to say that I am giving up – not at all – but there is about me an unwelcome ennui that I can’t shake and probably won’t until I am well. Yesterday I worked on the fair with Eric’s help, but I have much to do and very little time left to do it.

The fair opens on Friday, my birthday, and I was so looking forward to it. I took out all my books yesterday and was so amazed to see that my stock is not as depleted as I feared. The sight of all those lovely books cheered me then, but today I am worried, sick, and wishing the whole thing was over. Will I be better by then? I don’t know because I think some of what is ailing me now is complications from the dreaded fibro.

But today I will price my books and bag ephemera and somehow try to entice wellness, the elusive genie hiding in the bottle.