Cooking In the Storm

Two packages chicken breasts
Two heads Bibb lettuce
1/2 pound fresh mushrooms

It’s a dark, damp morning, the day after the first presidential debate, and I am writing my grocery list in my head. The house is still, the silence all-encompassing, a microcosm of the silence of a nation holding its breath. My fears today are many – some justified, some no doubt extrapolation – but I seem unable to delineate one from another. And so I do the one thing I know how to do in both good times and bad. I cook.

1 bottle dry cooking sherry
1 large bunch red grapes

My little grandson, who came to us four years ago by way of south Korea, is four and half now. He’s in kindergarten where he’s learning to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. The big words are tricky and the concepts mud puddles. But he stamps his feet in them and splashes until he’s drenched with their majesty -- the rest will come later. For now it’s enough to put his hand over his baby heart and cut to the chase, “Flag of the United States of America! Liberty and justice for all!”

2 cucumbers
1 container Parmesan cheese

Early this morning I saw two deer. In the space of time before the sun has fully risen deer blend so seamlessly with the backdrop of trees they are nearly invisible. If you want to see them – really see the grace and shape of who they are-- you have to look hard. If you focus on their color you’ll miss them every time.

1 loaf artisan bread
2 large tomatoes

Words tumble over words in my head, but I can’t bring them to my mouth, can barely force them out through my fingertips. I should be out canvassing the neighborhood, signing up voters, working the phone banks. I’m a world class talker – ask anyone who knows me. I could talk the legs off a donkey and sell the pope a double bed, but right now all I can do is cook. So I will do that then. And when I have chicken, and rice pilaf with mushrooms, salad, and bread, I will pack them all up and take them to the Democratic party headquarters to feed the young volunteers who are here from Chicago, Rhode Island and California. They crash on family room floors, eat whatever presents itself, work until the wee hours and then repeat it all over again day after day. They breathe life into the words my grandson shouts and the ones I can’t articulate.

1 bag celery
2 green peppers

I am silent today. My voice is stilled by anger, but mostly by grief. I am sick over what’s happening to our country, sick that Barrack Obama must contend with the circus his opponent is trying to make of the election during a time when our country is literally cracking open like an overripe pomegranate. We are bleeding, we are gushing blood like a geyser, and his opponent and the woman he is using for his own selfish means, are apparently insulated from the spatter. But we are not insulated. We are black, and white, Asian and Hispanic, sick and well, Christian and not Christian, straight and gay, poor and middle class, employed and unemployed, young and old. If we don’t succeed in making a difference this November we will continue to have no buffer from the raging storm of greed and lies they so neatly couch in words like faith and Christian. The last safe haven may be this kitchen. And so I will go there today and cook for Barrack Obama.

Ike's Last Breath

The last breath of Hurricane Ike blew over the Midwest rather spectacularly on Sunday. Nancy and I usually walk five miles on Sunday morning, but decided to delay until afternoon to get a few things done at home. Nancy showed up around five and almost immediately the many trees in my backyard started rockin’ and rollin.’

“I think we’re cooked,” I said. “Might as well sit down and talk.”

CRASH! The outer door of the screened porch flapped in the wind like Sarah Palin under the scrutiny of Charlie Gibson. Porch trees and plants fell like dominoes and one of several small decorative windows at the top of the screens imploded, leaving the brick floor littered with blue glass and smashed wood. I grabbed the door while Nancy saved a decorative stained glass panel and together we moved all the furniture as far back against the wall of the house as we could. At this point Nancy decided maybe she’d better make sure her own hatches were battened down and made a dash for the car. I stood at the door in amazement and growing apprehension. Our trees are not saplings. If they fell … My next thought was my husband who was in Indiana doing an outdoor show for his business. According to the Weather Channel, Cincinnati was hardest hit and he was but one hour away from Cincy.

By the time Ike gave up the ghost power was out in much of the area and the yard looked like a war zone. Eric had managed to get through on his cell phone earlier and all was well in Indiana, though the connection was so full of cracks all I heard was “me … okay now … okay?” By ten p.m. I had the glass cleaned up on the porch and Mickey the cat ensconced once again to take in the night air. The real work began yesterday.

By eight I was outside with a stack of leaf bags and a rake. A huge branch I’d heard glance off the office window was now impaled in the fence. I may be a hundred pound weakling, I but sang that old Helen Reddy song in my head “I am woman, hear me roar …“ and wrestled it out and around the house to the curb. Meanwhile next door, a crew showed up at the neighbor’s house to perform the same ablutions. I chatted with the workers awhile and then we all got down to business – they with their rip-roaring machines and me with my rake and leaf bags. The day was dank and overcast, but a sudden flash of joy filled me from the top of my head to my sandaled feet. We made it! We survived! The wet leaves and debris smelled fresh and earthy and I breathed in their scent glad to the core of my being that I was out there doing what I was doing.

Not long after this, the owner of the house with the crew strolled outside with his coffee for a chat. I know he thinks I’m a tree-hugger and he’d be right about that, especially since it was my trees that had left their body parts all over his bare, green expanse of lawn, but I think he sort of likes me anyway. We talked about the damage and I said, “There’s sure a lot to be done out here, but then that’s the price of paradise, right?”

“Well, I wouldn’t say THAT,” he replied.

I guess paradise is wherever you find it. For me it's right here on this street in this town in Ohio.

Death, Stories And Fresh Eggs

My mother used to say that death always comes in threes. This year two local booksellers died, one whom I didn’t know, and Doug Gunn whom I did. I miss the latter at book sales and will no doubt feel it keenly next week when we go to the Wooster AAUW sale. Last year I picked up a book there and heard a voice behind me cry, “Stop! Don’t do it!” I turned around and there was Doug laughing at my near mistake. He’d almost bought the same dud-in-disguise himself the very same morning. The last time I saw Doug was last fall at the Ashland sale when we both crowed with delight when they announced a ban on scanners. Doug was the first “old school” bookseller who made me feel like we were classmates, something I appreciate as much now as I did all those years ago.

I guess my mother was right about death pulling a trifecta though because on Monday Rob Levandoski, writer and bookseller (Two Bird Books of Akron), died suddenly of a brain aneurysm. Rob’s third novel “Fresh Eggs” was a 2004 Pulitzer prize nominee. The New York Times called him “a distinctive literary voice deserving to be more widely known.” I agree, which is why I think nature, God, the Universe, whatever, Whoever, got it wrong this time. But of course I don’t get a vote.

Last evening my friend Nancy, who is another local writer, and I went to calling hours at the funeral home. It had been a dark, rainy, glum day straight out of one of those Victorian English movies where they shoot from above, panning a sea of black umbrellas at the graveyard. For two days all Nancy and I could do was email each other endlessly. And yet for all that outpouring of emotion we were still shocked, sad, and so sorry for Carol, his wife of only five years. As we knew it would be, it was a rough go, and there were tears involved (mostly mine as I can cry on a dime), but we thought of a funny story about Rob and laughed our heads off too.

A few years back, Rob, Nancy, and another local writer, Betty Wetzel (who has also since died), were asked to be part of a panel discussion at the library about the writing life. Before it began, the moderator, who would never be accused of having a sense of humor, asked the trio if their publicists burdened them with too many events.

“Are you kidding? I had to sleep with mine just to get this gig,” Nancy deadpanned.

Picking it right up, Rob asked Nancy, “Do you think maybe you could sleep with mine too?”

Betty, a sly wit with a great Olympic laugh, cracked up and pretty soon everybody but the moderator was on a roll. Poor guy -- he looked like he was trapped with three live grenades and no access to the SWAT team, which I guess in a way he was.

I love that. Not only is it quintessential Rob, but it’s also the Ghunga Din of stories. We told it, and for one normal second laughed in the face of death. The best stories are like that though. They embolden us, make us strong, brave, and hopeful that there really is life not only after death, but in the face of it. Somebody famous (I forget who it was and I am not in the mood for research) said, “Boldness has genius, magic, and power in it.” I don’t know about genius, but I’ll certainly attest to magic and, most definitely, power. Without the stories, without all the pictures Carol had placed around the room, without the books and newspaper articles, Rob's first press pass, and his old antique typewriter -- all stories in their own right -- how would we ever have dealt with that much sorrow? Stories not only embolden us -- they save us too.

P.S. I just opened Rob's book "Fresh Eggs" and read the inscription dated four years ago. It says, "To Tess, Stop getting rich with the business and start writing again. Rob." I never got to tell him that after a six year dry spell, I finally did.

Form and Function

It’s official! The new library is finished and back up on the town square instead of operating out of an old DIY store as it has for the past two years. Today is Opening Day, but lucky me, I’ve already had a good look, thanks to a red and black invitation which summoned Eric and me to a special, guests only, sneak peak Thursday night. I was insanely excited to go and had been for weeks, but by the time the witching hour rolled around I felt as much relief as I did anticipation. A week ago today disaster struck the library.

We were blissfully unaware of it until Monday morning when Eric brought in the local paper. I was down the basement, as I am every morning from five a.m. to seven-thirty, wrapping books and listening to the radio. I love this time of day -- there’s just me, the orders, the credit card machine, the bubble wrap and the radio. I wrap, think, sing, dance a little and generally enjoy the solitude. It’s rare to have it interrupted, so when Eric hollered for me to come up I took the stairs at breakneck speed

Silently he held up the paper. The headline screamed “Sprinkler Floods Library.” One look and the wail of anguish was proportional to the destruction of the great Library of Alexandria. Nooooooooooooooooooooooooo! Say it isn't true!

But it WAS true. A frozen sprinkler in the attic thawed and spontaneously let loose in the adult fiction section drenching the floor with four inches of standing water. Dedicated staffers showed up Saturday night and worked into the wee hours of Sunday morning to save what books they could. A trailer was quickly dispatched from a moving company and the books piled onto it to be taken away and freeze dried. Of course some were lost, but the vast majority may well be saved. And best of all, the Grand Opening would still take place. It was okay, it would be okay. But the potential loss still unnerved me.

The night of the sneak preview it poured rain, but I dressed up as the occasion warranted in understated black topped off with the drop-dead vintage Hattie Carnegie gold choker I got for Christmas. Inside it was a gathering of the tribal leaders -- a party with books. But I barely noticed even the people I knew. I am not even going to try to describe the building. Just think contemporary chic without the hard edges. Just think dazzling.

I couldn’t help but compare it to my first visit there back in the early 70’s. Newly married and fresh from the big city, I was totally underwhelmed. But over the years it got better and better -- so much better that the ALA deemed it best in the nation a few years back. And now it is housed in an architectural wonder that far surpasses the new replacement library in my home town. (Think cell block. Think ugly.) As I stood there ruminating on that I recalled a conversation I had not long ago with an educated woman who actually said to me, “I think libraries are an anachronism. Who needs them? You can get on amazon.com and order anything you want.”

Yes, you can. Those of us who are fortunate enough to indulge can indeed do that. But not everyone has the discretionary income to order up books like Happy Meals. Libraries are a democracy, the one true equalizer sharing their wonders with everyone for the price of a small card. We need libraries. We need to see before our own eyes the depth and breadth of our culture. No, of course not everything humankind has produced is there -- there’s a decided shortage of papyri and incunabula -- but what is there is not chosen by vast corporations who have reduced what we read to the mechanics of “turning product.” At the library the small gems still glitter quietly and those who mine them are instant millionaires.

I need the library. I need to be in the presence of books that are not for sale. I need to see the old men reading magazines, the children scampering about with such unbridled glee they sometimes forget to use their inside voices. I need to see the retired teachers loading up on mystery novels, the teenagers gathered around library tables doing homework (well, a little homework) and the business people tapping away on computers. I need to return again and again to the place that nurtured my spirit when I was a small, unhappy child. I need the library to remind me who I was and who I have become because of it.

An anachronism? Hardly. In fact, I’ll be going back today. The sneak peak was all about form. Today is about function.

"My Darling Ellie ..."

One of the most magical things about being in the book trade is how frequently a special book or piece of ephemera will gravitate to its perfect home. Perhaps none has done that so spectacularly as something I got last year -- some would say “by accident.” However, I think it was meant to come to me, so I could be the conduit to its new and perfect home. If I hadn’t already known this, I would soon have learned it, as tangible proof arrived in the mail at Christmas -- a gift so amazing I had to share it, as well as its bittersweet story.

It all began last winter when I bought a box of turn-of-the-century Delineator magazines at an auction. I knew there were five or six in the box, but what I did not know was that underneath lay a small trove of ephemera consisting of a few letters, a utility bill receipt, a membership card for the Rosicrucians, a packet of old negatives from a pharmacy out west and a beautiful luggage label from a hotel in India. Delighted at my unexpected good fortune, I immediately set the magazines aside and sat on the floor to savor it all, beginning with the letters. As most booksellers who deal in ephemera will attest, most found letters are not keepers. While I personally enjoy reading about getting in the crops and the improvement of Grandma’s influenza, most people aren’t nearly so charmed.

But these letters were special -- I could feel it. They were addressed to a woman aboard a Japanese liner in the Pacific Ocean. The writer was from a college in India and the date was 1933. Carefully, I opened the first envelope and extracted a single sheet of thin paper written on both sides in flowing, if hard to read, script.

“My darling Ellie …”

Words as melodic as a waterfall tumbled from the pen of a poet. By the time I finished the last one, my spirit was in Ghandi’s India, overcome with sadness for these two star crossed lovers who could not possibly have remained together. The writer was Indian, the object of his affection an American. Sadly, the stub from the utility bill confirmed what I already knew. Thirty years later the woman was still Miss Ellie -----. Held up to the light, the negatives showed a woman in western clothing of the 30’s surrounded by the architecture and saris of India. There was no sign of an Indian lover, but how could there be? Such a thing was unthinkable then. An interracial love affair must be secret, a treasure in one’s pocket.

For several weeks I vacillated on what to do with the letters and the rest of the items, but finally decided to list them for sale. Almost immediately they sold to a long time customer from New Mexico, a geneaologist, who saw them initially as an interesting project. Right away she began digging into Ellie’s past and every so often would report back to me with her findings. Ellie was a Midwesterner, a teacher. She lived out of state all of her adult life, but was buried in the Midwest. A little tidbit here, a scrap there, but it wasn’t until April that Cindy called with the big news.

“Tess, the letters are not from a man. They’re from a woman. This was a lesbian affair. I’m positive of it.”

At first I was surprised, but almost immediately I knew she was right. “Yeah, makes sense. “ I said. “Remember that part about 'I wish I could have cooked for you?' No Indian guy in the 30’s is going to say something like THAT!” We laughed and quickly adjusted to this new dynamic.

What an intrepid woman Ellie must have to have been to ventured on such a journey alone and then to have formed such a dangerous liaison. Not only was it against the rules of the day to cross racial and religious lines, but to cross the gender line as well was potentially explosive. After this discovery, however, Cindy seemed to hit a dead end as nothing more was reported, though we did from time to time ruminate on "our girls" and wonder how it had ended and whether hearts had been broken. We hoped they hadn't, but felt sure they had.

Then in December a manila envelope arrived in the mail from New Mexico. I opened it and extracted a clear plastic sleeve. On the top was a photo of a temple, clearly in India. My heart raced. Immediately I knew what this was. Cindy had had the packet of negatives developed and sent me a few copies for Christmas! There were three pictures in all. The second showed a tall, strangely compelling woman in a sari. I knew at once it was her, the poet with the astonishing command of language. For a moment I studied her face. She was not pretty in the traditional sense, but a quiet strength, an inner light, so radiated from her that my first response was to whisper, “Oh, look at you! You’re beautiful!” I could certainly see why Ellie had been drawn to her. What I was not prepared for, however, was Ellie herself.

Ellie proved to be a short, dumpy woman in a polka dot dress wearing a straw hat from which dangled a clump of artificial cherries. She was seated on the ground next to the extraordinary woman in the sari enjoying a picnic for two. There was no question about the relationship. Had we not known before, we’d have known then by the way the woman in the sari regarded her, her hand laid so lovingly on Ellie’s arm and Ellie’s obvious discomfort. In one of the letters mention had been made of Ellie’s fear of discovery and here it was --captured by the camera in black and white. How different these two were, I thought, and yet who is to say what draws two people together? The woman in the sari would not be one to be taken in by surface beauty - that much is clear --so Ellie, too, must have been a woman of substance.

Of course we still don’t know how it ended and probably never will. All we know is that a few scraps from the past revealed a seventy-five year old secret which Cindy and I both feel morally bound to keep. For this reason I have changed Ellie's name and obscured the face in the photo. It was our privilege to share it, but the secret belongs to Ellie and her lover. It is, and will always be, their treasure in the pocket.

Cooking Up A Coincidence?

Anyone who has read this blog with even a passing interest (though I suppose thanks to my long absences nobody qualifies), I am enchanted by serendipity. Today was one of those delightful days when paths cross, stars line up, and thoughts are given a strange nudge from an Unseen Elbow.

On December 27th I listed a very nice copy of a limited edition, self-published book that struck me as rather unique -- Bake Slow and Sure; Heirloom Recipes from the National Road Era. Though there was neither a commercial, nor an academic, publisher to lend credence, a quick perusal proved that it was mercifully not one of those embarrassingly awful books that only the author’s friends will buy (and then only under duress), but a credible piece of workmanship. Actually it’s sort of two books in one -- a biography/history of Jane Skiles Byers and her husband, John White Byers, the author's great-great grandparents, who handed down the generations a very old cookbook, and also a cookbook itself filled with recipes from the National Road Era of 1818-1851. It was in new condition and signed by the author at the Fort Pitt Museum in 2003.

Late this morning the phone rang and who was on the other end of the line but the author himself, Frank La Cava. All 2000 copies have been sold, he told me, and though he may get around to reprinting it, right now he’s too busy writing a second book. We chatted for awhile and I found him a most learned historian and altogether guileless and charming in his delight in authorship and its resultant benefit of “being fussed over.” I wasn’t entirely sure why he called, but it didn’t matter -- it was a lovely interlude.

We hung up and I went back to the task of listing books. Almost immediately the bell on the computer dinged and I checked my email to find an order on my own website for Bake Slow and Sure. At first I thought Frank had ordered a copy himself, as I regularly sell authors their own first editions. But no. This copy was ordered by a woman in Pennsylvania to be shipped to a man in Albequerque. How weird is THAT, I thought to myself as I wrote her a note asking if it was a gift and if she would like me to gift wrap it and enclose a card with her message. Almost immediately she phoned. Yes, please, she would like it wrapped for her twin brother’s birthday.

“Both my brother and I love to cook,” she confided. “I hadn’t a clue what to buy him and so I was just fooling around on Google and it led me to you and this book. We were talking at Thanksgiving and I told him that I have our mother’s cookbook and he was anxious to make some of the recipes we ate when we were kids. There’s something about food from the past, the way it looks and smells and tastes that makes you remember. It brings up so many stories.”

This was getting downright eerie. Back in the late 90’s I wrote a book about storytelling that Reader’s Digest actually excerpted. A few weeks ago I was interviewed by a local newspaper about storytelling and the elderly. I didn’t want to do it, but the reporter was an old friend, and I couldn’t say no. To my amazement it was as if no time had passed at all since I wrote the book. I found myself talking with such passion and interest I felt like I'd been plugged into the wall socket. Later I thought maybe it was one topic I could actually revisit. As the days went by the idea kept popping back up. First I thought I’d try to resell an updated version of the original manuscript. It is, after all, the sole book with my name on it that I don’t despise -- too much. But the more I thought about it the more I wanted to explore the relationship between cooking and storytelling, as well as the idea of food as story.

And now here was this woman stating my theme to me! Amazing. Absolutely amazing how a book I never heard of led a guy in Pennsylvania to call up to chat with me about history and cooking and a woman in Pennsylvania to order the same obscure book she’d never heard of just moments later to send to a man in Albequerque, which led me to ask if was a gift, which then prompted her to expound on cooking and storytelling! Coincidence? Nope. Not a chance. The Unseen Elbow strikes again!

Thanks for the Memories

New Year’s makes me nervous. I know rationally that time is a continuum and any effort on our part to slice and dice it is essentially meaningless in the grand scheme of the cosmos. But there is something about ushering out the “old year” and welcoming in the new that always seems risky to me. It’s like sticking our thumbs in our ears, wagging our fingers and chanting “Nah, nah-nah, nah, nah!” as we dance around the Fates. Much better I think to lay low and make a nice pork roast.

Yet I am surprisingly content this New Year’s Day, 2008. Even my husband commented on it. “Wow, ” he said watching as I ran the vacuum cleaner across the family room rug with a flourish. “You love everything today.”

Yes, I do love everything today. Well, maybe not everything. I can name any number of goings-on in Washington and the Middle East that fill me with despair. I also don’t love that I forgot to turn the oven on to cook the nice pork roast, so the latter is moldering in the trash as we speak. But at least at this moment of this day, in this office, in this house, there is contentment and even a sense of opti …

STOP! Scratch the optimism. My essentially melancholy Irish nature struggles mightily with optimism. Let’s just say there’s hope and leave it at that.

It occurs to me that perhaps what matters more than optimism anyway is gratitude. By tomorrow I’ll be bitching about lowball offers on e-bay, bad TV and the fact that the library hasn’t reopened from the move to it’s new and improved digs uptown. But right now I’m here. We are here. And we have -- I have -- much to be thankful for. Not only am I blessed with a patient husband, great kids, amusing and faithful friends, and a little boy who calls me Gran, but sales at Garrison House Books were up considerably last year. And even after ten years in this wacky, constantly evolving business I still wake up happy and excited to be a bookseller.

I just hope the darn pork roast doesn’t jinx it.

For The Birds!

If the picture to the left seems dull as dishwater, that’s precisely the point. This is a story about a little blue booklet so drab if it were a debutante its dance card would be revoked. I bought it last week, sold it this week, and will still be talking about it when I get to bookseller’s heaven where, thanks to said little blue booklet, there’s a luxurious white cloud waiting with my name on it.

It all began last week when I spotted the homely little thing at my favorite book sale of the year. I looked at it, put it back, picked it up, set it down again. Finally, on my second pass through the tables I bought it on the half chance that with the new interest in “going green” someone might actually want to learn how to turn a golf course into a bird sanctuary. The booklet was published by the Audubon Society in the thirties and was called Golf Clubs As Bird Sanctuaries. It was liberally illustrated with black and white photos, mostly of birds nesting in trees scattered around golf courses, or “golf clubs” as they were called then. Now that I think about it, I’m pretty sure the oddly worded title caught my fancy as much as anything. I distinctly remember a hazy mental image of baby bird beaks gaping hungrily out of the top of a leather bag full of golf clubs. There may have been some of those funky knitted cozies on top of the clubs too, but I can't swear to that.

Anyway, the booklet surfaced in a box late Thursday afternoon so I duly listed it online. Pricing was a bit of a problem, as, oddly, there were no comparables. But I looked it over pretty well and could see nothing other than its apparent, and probably temporary, scarcity to recommend it. So I listed it at a pie-in-the-sky $25 and went cheerfully off to watch the Cleveland Cavaliers lose to the Spurs in game one of the finals. By the time the slaughter was over the little blue booklet had sold on ABE to a guy in England. I tried deleting it from my other venues, but it hadn’t indexed yet, so I went to bed. By morning it had sold again on Biblio, this time to an American. As I was sending regrets to Buyer Two it occurred to me that with so much interest so fast I’d probably under-priced it. “Should have asked fifty,” I muttered, hitting the Send button.

Immediately Buyer Two fired back a note. If I hadn’t already shipped it, he would like to offer me $300 for it. I cleaned my reading glasses to make sure I’d read that right, and thought about Eric’s teeth and the $800 dental bill (after insurance) that had arrived the previous day. I admit it. For a nanosecond I wavered, but in the end declined so I could live with myself in relative peace. I did, however, ask him why anyone would pay so much for such an ugly (ha-ha) duckling.

Right away he shot me a second email explaining that the great golfer Bobby Jones was on the Board when they published it. Since I wouldn’t know a putter from a pickaxe, the name meant nothing to me, but I checked the booklet and, sure enough, there was a Robert Jones listed among the Board members. Quickly, I googled Bobby Jones and learned that he’d won the first Grand Slam in 1930.

“I’ll give you $400,” Buyer Two concluded.

Gulp.

Again, I thought of Eric’s teeth and the $800 dental bill and wavered a second time. But in the end I stuck fast to the original no. No, I couldn’t live with myself if I did it. No, it wouldn’t be right. No it goes against my vision of who I am and what I’m about. No, I couldn’t possibly. No, no, no …

Now here it is twenty-four hours later and I am filled with regret. No, not for the string of emphatic nos. The money would have been great, but the karma wouldn’t, so that one was a no-brainer. What I regret is the failure of it all. If there’s one thing I can’t stand it’s failure and this time the self-appointed Queen of Research failed big. Of course it’s not like Bobby Jones had signed the thing and I’d missed the signature. And Robert Jones is a very common name, so even if Bobby and I had been buddies in a former life why would I recognize his name when it was printed formally on a brochure about birds? I tried out all the rationalizations I could think of, but in the end I felt pretty stupid. And still do.

It didn’t help that while I was writing this, Buyer THREE called on the phone from London to rub salt in my wounds. I am not making this up either. I swear on a stack of Golf Clubs As Bird Sanctuaries that he really did call right in the middle of the explanation about Bobby Jones. He’d seen the listing on ChooseBooks yesterday and printed it out, but when he went back to order it it was gone. So he figured he’d “ring up” and see if I still had it.

Regretfully, I don’t. I shipped it to Lancashire this morning. All I can say is, that lofty perch in bookseller heaven better be a Sterns & Foster. I deserve the Cadillac of clouds for this one.

Small Marvels

Sunday Morning Joe suggested last week that I ought to write a post based on a particularly gratifying conversation we conducted in the wee hours of a Sunday morning past. I think it was back in January sometime -- maybe even Super Bowl Weekend, though why I would ever remember Super Bowl Weekend as football challenged as I am, I have no idea. I also have no idea how it it was that we got to talking about small pleasures in the first place, but it sure was a small pleasure doing it.

Some things we agreed on right up front -- reading, the changing of the seasons, homemade soup (though he goes for split pea and I go for anything that's NOT split pea), the first sip of morning coffee ( small disconnect here too, as he for some strange, unknown reason likes Taster's Choice crystals and I prefer Folger's dark gourmet. fresh brewed )-- but other things were our own unique delights. Take bubble baths, for instance. Is there anything so gratifying as a good book ands a scorching hot bath scented with mango? Ohmygod, I could stay in there until I turned into a prune, or the hot water ran out, which ever came last. Then there's black licorice. I know most people like the fake red stuff, but when it comes to licorice I'm such a purist I could be on the Food Channel expouding on its piquant qualities. Yes, I could be the Rachel Ray of licorice! One of the best Christmas presents I ever got was back in the 70's when Eric and I had only been married a couple years. He gave me this huge box filled with 23 paperback novels by my then-favorite author and about ten bags of black licorice in various forms. I couldn't have asked for another thing-- which is not to say that the occasional bottle of Oscar de la Renta, which said husband presented me with this past Valentine's Day (he calls it Oscar's Daily Rent), isn't likewise appreciated.

Anyway, the point is that ever since that conversation with Sunday Morning Joe I seem to keep adding small delights to my mental list. Fresh sheets on the bed, Tyler's little voice on the phone saying "Hi Gran," popcorn and movies, the view out the kitchen window, Sunday walks with Nancy, Saturday morning talks with Jessica, making a great find at a book sale, a clean house (best if I wasn't the cleaner), a new issue of the New Yorker in the mail, the company of cats, a looooooooong email from Lisa, the writer's group sitting around my dining room table, daffodils, lilacs, Motown, dancing, Irish music, my kids, lipstick, skinny jeans, being skinny enough to wear skinny jeans, Pino Grigio, champagne, sharing ebay stories with my niece Liza, Christmas trees, white twinkle lights, fireworks, Ode to Joy, small town parades, porches, grocery shopping, penny candy, pajamas, altered books, bookstores, walking on the beach, a sky full of stars, fireflies, the sound of croaking frogs at night, good neighbors like Linda next door, talking in line at book sales, PT Cruisers, getting up early, the Gilmore Girls, ephemera, the morning paper, Sunday Morning Joe ...

I could go on and on, but one thing's for sure. No matter how much there is to complain about -- and God knows I complain more than I ought to --the world is filled with marvels. And the best part is they're right there all the time and lots of them cost little to nothing. The secret is to recognize a marvel when you see one and don't wait until things get better to appreciate it. I think I've always known this, but it's taken me fifty-five years on the planet to make a point of fnding them every single day. I highly recommend it.

The Zen of Bookselling

When I began as a bookseller ten years ago this April it never occurred to me that bookselling was a free lunch. Go to a library sale, load up, and – presto! chango! – money cascading into your account. The crazy part is that the money did sort of cascade in those early halcyon days of internet selling. But even so, I knew that if I wanted to turn my lifelong love affair with books into a successful, dignified, and meaningful business I needed to knuckle down and learn a few things. So, autodidact that I am, I opted for baptism by total immersion. I read countless books about books, experimented with packaging materials, learned how to keep careful records, transferred the customer service skills I had attained in my former job as PR director for a nursing home complex into my new endeavor, and polished my writing skills to offer detailed descriptions of my wares. To do any less seemed to me to trivialize a time honored profession -- witht he operative word being profession.

All that was great and has served me well, but there was a missing component which, strangely enough, I just “got” very recently. The cosmic joke is that it was taught to me by the very people to whom I had developed a natural antipathy – the new breed of booksellers who, along with their corporate counterparts, have discovered that used, out-of-print, and rare books are Big Business. For years now I have ranted over their rudeness at sales as they shoved past me -- and into me -- to grab as many fetching little moneymakers as they could, rolled my eyes when they made such inane statements as, “You don’t gotta know nothin’ to sell books,” and seethed at the eternal beeping of the scanning devices which allow them to check the going rate for books on the Big River (a.ka. Amzon.com) via ISBN number.

“There sure was a lot of communing with the great god amazon today,” I’d tell my husband after a sale. We’d laugh, but inside I was becoming less and less amused.

Meanwhile as the hobby sellers reproduced like one-celled microorganisms the corporate entities became greedier and ever more paternalistic in their dealings with sellers. Little by little the original joy I had found in bookselling began slipping away. It’s not that I didn’t love my work. Nothing could take away the deep satisfaction of the books themselves, the exhilarating interaction with the customers, even the pleasure of such mundane tasks as cleaning and wrapping. But my attitude was nonetheless becoming as sour as an old pickle.

So how did I finally “get it”? And what is it that I finally got? The answer to the first question is I don’t know. There were no thunderbolts, no one big defining moment. It just happened and as quietly as if on Carl Sandburg’s “little cat feet.” I may not know the how, but I sure know the what and that is simply this – my anger at the sellers and the corporations stemmed from a primal fear that they would snatch away this thing that meant so much to me. The truth is, of course, that you can’t run a business, or a life, based on fear. I’m not big on religion, but I’m all over faith -- faith in a limitless Universe and a benign Creator with a sense of humor and a heart the size of Her creation. I had just failed to understand that faith and intention are as much a part of bookselling as knowledge. What the penny sellers and the scanners do has nothing to do with me. My intention is what it always has been -- to run a dignified, meaningful business, to serve my customers well and to enjoy doing it. And it's working! Watching other sellers scurrying around like ants tossing books helter-skelter into boxes has made me realize exactly what I DON'T want and, most importantly, exactly what I do.

So then. Railing at external forces is a monumental waste of energy, not to mention damaging to the soul. Far better to simply live in the Light, walk my own path, and follow the river -- just not the one with the dot com extension.

Dinner With My Mother

It’s six-thirty in the morning and I am alone in my office staring at my mother’s photo in her online obituary. She’s all dolled up in a pretty dress with perfectly coiffed hair, nice glasses and jewelry. Her smile is wide, sweet even, but I feel no sense of recognition. Who is this old lady masquerading as my mother? And what did they do with the real one?

My mother left us six years ago when my father had to be admitted to a nursing home. I begged her not to, but she went anyway because living with her sister was preferable to taking her chances with her daughters. Her fear that we might put her in a nursing home trumped any desire to see us again. The loss of us – my sister and me, my two daughters, and the great grandchild she never knew – was a price I guess she was willing to pay. I’ve often wondered whether it was worth it and truly hope it was because, frankly, it would have given me sticker shock

I knew when she left I’d never see her again and that’s just about the way it worked out. My aunt is an all or nothing, black or white, love them or hate them sort of woman. With her there are no gradations and certainly no mercy. She took our mother away, slammed the door behind her, and left us with our father until he died three years later. In my mother’s family the tradition is to fight like hell with your relatives until they die and then canonize them the day after. I refuse to carry it on. The bold, flat, honest-to-God truth is my mother was a holy terror when we were children, controlling and hard to get along with when we were adults, and absolutely delightful just before she left, thanks to a strange, unnamed psychosis.

During that period she screamed at imaginary people out the side door. Saw Clark Gable in the trees beyond the living room picture window. Giggled like a school girl to think he was making eyes at her. Cowered at the sight of imaginary bugs crawling out of the ceiling. And clawed at her arms to scratch their imaginary bites. But for the first time in her life she seemed to actually like me. I’d bring her dinner at night – scalloped potatoes and ham, chicken and noodles, mac and cheese, comfort foods that made her clap her hands with delight.

“Here she comes!” she’d crow as I came through the side door laden down with casseroles and salads. “We’ll have fun now!”

Once when I was sitting with her while she ate, she laid down her fork, looked at me intently, and said, “You’re so pretty.” I think the thought had never occurred to her before.

When I’d help her to bed she’d apologize for being so much trouble. And sometimes she’d show me her little stuffed dog and tell me what he’d had to say to her that day. My mother was charmed with me and I with her. Of course I knew it was some chemical imbalance in the brain, some hardwiring run amok. But I like to think that maybe by falling down the rabbit hole of mental illness she had a tea party with the little girl she must have been once upon a time

I’ll never know though because she left soon after and almost immediately I became embroiled in a legal battle with my aunt to make sure my father’s rights were protected. When I prevailed she had my mother sign a paper which legally separated her from her husband of 51 years. I never saw either woman again until three years later when they came to my father’s funeral. By then the psychosis was gone, or the right combination of drugs had finally been achieved. Either way, any charm I’d developed in her eyes seemed to have leeched away. She talked pleasantly enough to my sister and me, but clearly wasn’t too interested in either of us. And so, that was that.

Now its three years later and we found out that she died on Monday, New Year’s Day. The obituary doesn’t say where, or of what ailment. It does say she had two daughers, but it doesn’t list our names. And it never mentions that she was grandmother to my two daughters and great-grandmother to our beloved Tyler. Though my mother would never have won the Grandmother of the Year Award, in her way she liked my children and would never have excluded them. She could be mean, but she was not calculating. She didn’t plan to hurt people, she just did it. Not so her sister. But it doesn't really matter anymore, as we won’t be going to the funeral. I will close the screen on the offending obituary and remember my mother in my own way. Maybe I’ll make her some macaroni and cheese.

Heaven's Suggestion

Back when I was a struggling writer I used to harbor this Christmas fantasy so embarrassing I blush to think of it. I was reminded of it this year when the doorbell suddenly rang in the midst of my annual writer’s group Christmas party.

“Maybe that’s it!” Nancy shouted, waving her wineglass. “Your Christmas fantasy come true.”

“Ha-ha,” I replied. “As if.”

In order for a publisher to be sending me a big, fat Christmas contract I would first have to have written a big, fat new book -- which we all know I have not. Turns out it was just UPS working late into the night to drop off the DVDs I’d ordered from overstock.com. But the unexpected intrusion got me to thinking about old dreams and Christmas miracles and what it would be like if they really did come true. I knew it was silly, childish even, but part of me longed for a Christmas miracle. The publishing thing was out, of course, and I had no notion of what might replace it, but my heart was definitely open to heaven’s suggestion. So it was in that frame of mind that I answered the phone a few days later.

“Can you help me find a book?” a sweet elderly female voice asked.

“I’d be happy to try,” I replied. “What the title?”

“Well, that’s just it. I don’t know.”

“Do you know who wrote it?”

“No. All I know is that my sister and I read it in the 30’s and it changed our lives. We still talk about it to this day. I want to get it for her for either Christmas, or her birthday on January 4th. She’ll be 82.”

“Hmmm, that might be a little tricky,” I said. “But think hard. What can you remember about it?

"Oh, I remember a lot. It was dark, the cover I mean, and I think it might have been set in a little brown house. But then again maybe it was published by Little Brown.”

At this point many booksellers would have rolled their eyes and suddenly realized they had a call waiting on the other line. But when Greta laughed at the absurdity of what she’d just said, I knew she was my kind of girl. For better or for worse, I’d been tapped to be her book finder. For the better part of half an hour we laughed and talked and finally nailed down a few concrete details. The story was about five sisters whose names were Faith, Hope, Charity, Peace and something that didn’t fit. They baked cakes and Peace, the youngest, was a hell raiser of the first order. Armed with these details, I was ready to sally forth into the valley of vintage children’s books.

Trouble is, neither Google, Yahoo, nor all the king’s men or all the king’s horses cooperated. I tried so many things I can’t even remember the sequence of events, but it concluded with a plea on booksleuth at abebooks.com where I hoped and prayed that someone would recognize the sketchy plotline. Almost right away the suggestions poured in, but it didn’t take long to realize that none of them were right.

“You tried,” my husband consoled me. “Now give it up. It’s nearly impossible with so little information.”

Of course it wasn’t impossible! And anyway, impossible or not, I was Greta’s book finder, not her book looker. Finally on the afternoon of December 20th I went back to booksleuth on the half chance that someone else had logged on. And there it was – At The Little Brown House by Ruth Alberta Brown.

“That can’t be right,” I muttered. The first day she called I’d asked Greta about that very book which I’d sold last year and she’d assured me it didn’t ring any bells. But the guy on booksleuth was almost certain that was it.

Quickly, I did a search and found two copies on the net. I emailed both dealers with my sketchy info and one wrote back immediately. Faith, Hope and Peace were all present, and accounted for, as was someone named Gail. There was even a part about cakes, but there was no reference she could see to Charity. It took several calls to local librarians and a copy speedily sent through interlibrary loan from the Burton, Ohio library to confirm it. I'd done it -- I'd actually found Greta's book. Charity was in there after all. It’s just that she goes by the name Cherry.

That night I ordered it, nearly bursting with the excitement of being part of a Christmas miracle. Actually, I ordered both of the copies I’d found, one for her sister and one for Greta. The bill for the first book came to $25. The second one was paid in full with one stipulation. Even before she knew that I used to write professionally, Greta told me that all her life she’d wanted to be a writer. For a short while straight out of high school she’d covered the military desk for the old Cleveland Post and written stories about local boys serving in WWII. But then life took several unexpected turns. She became a wife, a mother of five, a widow much too soon, and a baker of fabulous cakes and never wrote again. Lately she’s been thinking about maybe writing down a few stories for posterity, but so far hasn’t picked up a pen. She never went to college, she explained, and it had been too long since she’d tried composing anything. So there’s where the stipulation comes in. The price of the second book, I told her, is the promise that she’ll forget time and the lack of a degree and start writing again.

When I began this blog I thought that finding Greta’s book was my Christmas miracle, but now I see I that I got it all wrong. The book was just a conduit to bring together two people who share the same old dream and needed the same exact thing. The real miracle was that in giving each other the gift of belief we found it in ourselves -- if only for a little while.

Sundays with Joe

As always, I find myself fascinated by how life’s seemingly inconsequential threads silently weave themselves together to bestow a sense of meaning to those willing to seek it. While I was writing about my love for the movie 84 Charing Cross Road and bemoaning my neurotic perfectionism, a new piece of cloth was being woven in the background. It’s a bright, crazy explosion of color– orange and purple I think – one of those open weave sort of things where the threads run downhill and end up with a crooked fringe on all four sides. Every time I think about it it makes me laugh, primarily because it’s bright enough to send distress signals to the moon yet I only now realized it for what it is.

What it is is this – an unexpected blessing and proof positive that God has a sense of humor. The British bookseller on Charing Cross Road had his eccentric customer, Helen Hanff, and Mitch Albom had his Tuesdays With Morrie, but neither one of them had anything on me. Lucky me, I’m a bookseller who has Sundays With Joe.

Joe is a customer who came into my life via Alibris, which is joke in itself since at the time Alibris was the one online book service that worked the hardest to keep the gap between customer and bookseller wider than the Mississippi River after a monsoon. But none of their technological tomfoolery stopped Joe -- he plowed right in and found me anyhow. The big question is why he hung around. I mean all I ever did was sell him a book -- a nice book and wrapped rather prettily too -- but, even so, it’s hardly enough to make me worthy of my own private brass band. And yet a brass band is what I got. Joe laughs at my jokes, talks me out of the trees when I get hysterical, teaches me things I don’t know, and reassures me that he never says anything bad about me. It doesn’t get much better than that, especially considering the fact that he was building radios back when the only thing I was building involved alphabet blocks.

Currently he’s instructing me in the intricacies of the Fibonacci sequence. Laugh, but this is much harder than it seems, as I am profoundly mathematically challenged, though Joe won’t brook that excuse for a nanosecond.

“Come on Tess, you have to do this! I know it's hard, but the more you look, the easier it gets. Look again! It builds CHARACTER.”

This came after I whined about last week’s lesson which required the transmission of a large color photo of the heart of a flower in which all the tight little yellow seed pod things swirled in two different directions. My assignment was to count the rows of seed pod things going each way. Think it’s easy? Well, think again, as the heart of a flower truly examined not only crosses your eyes, but sends them, boinging ( yes, boinging) out of their sockets. My answer was twelve each way, but I doubt I’m right, and even if I am, I haven’t a clue what it has to do with adding sequential numbers together to arrive at the next number in the sequence. I’m sure I’ll find out come Sunday morning though

Which brings me to the cool part of the story. All this fun stuff is conducted in its near entirety on Sunday mornings, usually before the sun crawls across the horizon. Before most people are even up, much less caffeinated, heavy discussions are being conducted across cyberspace about such things as loons, the game 25 Words Or Less, the benefits of walking, basketball versus football, perfectionism, nuns, movie dialogue and, of course, the Fibonacci sequence.

Why this cloth is being woven in the background of my life I don’t know, but I suspect it’s a spiritual enterprise. (I can already hear Joe laughing at that one, but never mind.) Every Sunday morning my friend Nancy and I walk five miles, an endeavor I know for a fact is a spiritual enterprise. Since this discourse has become its prelude, it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if the cloth turns into a coat of many colors. It’s already orange and purple and bright enough to send distress signals to the moon. And Joseph, let us not forget, was the guy with the amazing technicolor dreamcoat.

The Moral of the Chicken Juice Shower

Life has strange ways of bringing us to our knees. Sometimes it’s metaphorical and sometimes it’s literal. For me, it was both, which partially explains my silence, since the event occurred exactly two weeks ago today, the day after I wrote my last blog. It was six-thirty a.m. of the morning of my niece Mandy’s wedding shower. The afore-mentioned tarts had been baked and arranged in all their cherry-almond and apple-cranberry splendor on trays in the refrigerator. Their baker, however, was anything but splendid. I was bleary-eyed, vaguely out of sorts from the previous day’s existential angst, and looking like the remains of a gone-to-seed dandelion after a puff of wind. If that seems like an exaggeration just visualize wrinkly aqua p.j.s. and olive green socks.

Anyway, I opened the refrigerator, waved my hand around in the general vicinity of the red plastic container of Folger’s as I do every morning, and wound up plastered against the kitchen island. I’m telling you -- I never saw this one coming. The coffee container hit a bowl of defrosted chicken and sent the whole thing hurtling forward onto the floor, giving both trays of tarts a fly-by chicken juice shower on the way down. I suppose a less neurotic person might have trusted the integrity of plastic wrap, but I had not been PR director of a nursing home for three long years for nothing. I’d seen the Health Department inspector give the Dietary Director a citation for putting her purse on the counter, for Pete’s sake. Never mind squadrons of salmonella flying around inside the Maytag.

So I did the only thing I could -- dropped to my knees, picked up the chicken, scrubbed the devil out of the laminate, dumped the (perfect) tarts down the garbage disposal and began taking everything out of the #$%^&&** refrigerator. That’s right -- I swore a lot, which I have found is the best front line of defense when life brings you to your knees in small, but absolute, ways. The funny thing is, while I was down on the floor screaming like a banshee a couple major thoughts occurred to me. First I wondered whether I had enough ingredients to make more tarts. (No.) Next I wondered what I could make in their place. (Cookies, lemon bars, brownies) And then it occurred to me that I would make absolutely nothing. That’s right – nothing. Zip. Zero. Zilch. NADA. I would go to the bakery as if I were a truly sane person who understands the reason God invented bakeries and buy some tarts.

Once that was decided, it next occurred to me that maybe it wasn’t an accident that the chicken took a joy ride. Maybe it was to show me that I really don’t have to go through life as a neurotic pleaser. (Wow! There’s a novel thought!) And maybe -- just maybe -- my whole problem with not writing anymore has something to do with being a neurotic, perfectionistic pleaser. And maybe since I'm writing a blog it means that I'm technically writing anyway. And maybe if I can write a blog then it stands to reason that maybe I can write something else too!

So I went to the bakery, bought the tarts, took them to the shower, told a funny story about it, went home, and started writing something. And that’s why I haven’t written anything here for fourteen days. I’ve been too busy writing what might become a novel. Or not. But it doesn't matter whether it does, or it doesn't, because A.) I'm writing again and B) (this is the amazing part) I'm having a blast doing it!

Blog Day Afternoon

It’s late afternoon, Saturday, the day I had set aside to transform myself from bookseller into domestic diva. It started out well enough – did the laundry, changed the bed linen, emptied the dishwasher and made a double batch of tarts for my niece’s wedding shower tomorrow. But no sooner were the “have-tos” done than the Martha Stewart in me took off her apron and headed south. I’m in a decidedly melancholy mood today, brought on by two phone calls and a couple odd things I’ve been thinking about all week.

First, the odd things. I was reading John Allen’s book, Opus Dei, which is about the secret Catholic organization Dan Brown made famous in The Da Vinci Code. To be honest, I thought Allen would serve it up on a gold-plated paten with a side of pap, as he has ties to both the Catholic press and the Vatican, but I was wrong. It’s a pretty even-handed account, which in summation, seems to insinuate that while Opus Dei isn't as heinous as you might think, it's not exactly the local Kiwanis Club either. Of course I may be wrong about that, as my "recovering Catholic" sensibilities recoiled somewhere around page 153 and I never finished the book. I thought about it some, but it frankly it gave me the creeps, so I tossed it into the primeval stew of my subconscious and thought instead about how tortunous it is for me to not finish a book once I start reading it. This led to a memory of the summer I was ten and tried to read every book in the library, but never got past the first shelf of A’s because every time I went back there were always new A’s.

For the rest of the week though every time I passed Opus Dei lying on a table in the family room it caught my eye. First I’d think about the creepiness, then I’d feel a stab of guilt for not finishing it. Then, invariably, I’d remember how ten year old me actually thought she could read herself around the children’s room of the library and a wave of sadness would lap at my feet.

Then this morning Jessica called and somehow we got to talking about my family of origin. We like to rehash stuff we already know, Jessica and I, just in case there might be a nuance we hadn’t chewed over in the last 25 years. There didn’t appear to be, but I still hung up feeling sort of off-kilter. A couple hours later, while I was making the tarts, Laurie called to see how our friend Nancy is recovering from the complications of a hysterectomy. Since the news is good on that front, we wandered off onto a bunch of other topics and finally settled in on me not writing anymore, which led Laurie, whom you may recall is a fellow writer, to launch into a passionate speech about why I need to start.

I wish I could recall exactly what she said because it was really good. I know this because her impassioned speeches about writing are always good. It's just that this time I got sidetracked by the fact that though none of her words implied any of these things, every single one contained in its nucleus Catholicism, guilt, and the innocence of my ten year-old self yearning to read every book in the library.

Pass the primeval stew, please, and hand me a big spoon. This may take awhile.

The Cat Who Would Never Make A Book

Not long ago, while I was perusing new fiction at the local library (which is currently being housed in a former DIY store until the massive downtown renovation can be completed), a certain librarian who will go unnamed (Hi, Liz!), filed a complaint with the Blog Department. It seems that this librarian is a secret reader of my blog and wished to lodge her grievance on behalf of Mickey, our former street thug turned Bookcat.

“You never write about the cat,” she accused.

“I do so,” I countered. “There’s even a PICTURE of the cat.”

“Yes, but you never write about the cat. If the name of the blog is Books Art Life And A Cat then it’s only fair that you write about the cat.”

The Blog Department emitted a deep sigh and agreed to write about the cat.

So here I am -- writing about the cat.

Before I begin though, it must first be understood that I am NOT one of those pet owners who takes the cat to get his picture taken with Santa Claus. I do not travel with this cat, nor do I force him to endure the indignity of rhinestone collars. I don’t buy fresh shrimp and albacore tuna for him. I don’t cook his food. I don’t serve him dinner in a crystal bowl and I most emphatically do not coo at him. I talk to him like the cool laid-back guy he is and he greatly appreciates it.

Secondly, it must be understood that even though “they” say that love is blind I’m not buying it. The real deal is that love sees all faults and wades in anyway. So that being said, I harbor no illusions that Mickey’s any smarter, cuter, or more amusing than he actually is. Rest assured that if something were to happen to the ultimate feline sleuth, Koko, Lillian Jackson Braun would not be begging me to let her use Mickey as his stand-in for her next “The Cat Who …” mystery. Koko knocks books off shelves to provide clues to murders. Mick does it because he’s so ungainly he could trip over The Cat In the Hat, never mind War and Peace. Koko escorts unwanted and suspicious guests to the door. Mick, who is incapable of keeping a civil tongue in his head, licks them until they settle back with tea and crumpets. Koko loves to listen to the classics being read aloud. Mick regards the classics as leatherbound mattresses. Koko can read backwards. Mick can’t even read four words.

Bottom line --Mickey is nothing more than a big, loveable goofball who was rescued from the mean streets of suburban Medina and has a few missing teeth to prove it. Which is not to say he isn't a great guy. He is. He keeps a low profile, asks for little, keeps me warm in the winter, makes me laugh, doesn't claw the furniture, understands the purpose of a litter box, plays well with others, and never runs with scissors.

That's it.

Which means that I have now officially written about the cat.

Good "Book Feel"

Every once in awhile a movie comes along that causes me to break Cardinal Rule #1 of Movies -- never watch the same one twice or you’ll never live long enough to see everything you want to. I broke that rule this week and may even break it a bunch more times once I buy my own copy. Of course, such a purchase will be breaking Cardinal Rule #2 of Movies – never, EVER buy the movie, as movies take up space and have to watched in order to justify their existence, which therefore automatically runs amok of Cardinal Rule #1. But I don’t care. I made the stupid rules and I can break them if I want to.

So what’s this great movie causing so much flagrant rule breaking? 84 Charing Cross Road. It’s an oldie based on the book of the same title by Helen Hanff. I’d read it some years back, and though enchanted by the 20 year correspondence between the author in New York City and a British bookseller in London, I was more taken with the situation than the actual letters. But that was before Anne Bancroft and Anthony Hopkins transmitted themselves into both my family room and my heart -- he so genteely and she so NOT. I laughed, I cried, I even clasped my hands like a Victorian lady having a case of the vapors. The latter occurred at the part where Ann rhapsodizes over the joys of a used book – how wonderful it is to have it fall open to the page where the last reader left off, how delightful to be informed by notes, or marks, of the significance of passages you might have skimmed over left to your own uneducated devices, even how a gift inscription is not a flaw, but a part of the book’s unique history.

But what really had me in need of smelling salts was the part where the first parcel of books arrives from across the pond. Anne crashes up the stairs of her walk-up and, once inside the door, falls on the package like a ravenous dog on an untended beef roast. As soon as the first book is released from its packet (which itself is fetchingly tied with string) she’s a goner. Just the feel of it, so much more sensual than its plebian modern counterparts, which to this day tend to be paper over boards with paper jackets, sends her into a swoon of ecstasy.

Right then and there I knew this was the movie for me. It had it all – humor, pathos, intrigue, a touch of romance, and good book feel. Name one other movie with good book feel. You can't. So, Cardinal Rules be damned, I have to buy – I just bought –84 Charing Cross Road.

The Deer Stalker

I’ve mentioned before how, for some inexplicable reason, something seemingly innocuous will happen, and I’ll hang on to it like it was my last dime. Well, it happened again and it’s partly why I haven’t written anything new lately. I’ve been trying to figure out why in the world a deer, albeit a gorgeous one, has become my latest mind stalker.

It all began last week when my writer’s group met, as they often do, at my house. I was tidying up a bit before their arrival when I looked out the expanse of bay window in the living room and nearly cut an antique table off at the knees with the Hoover. There, not six feet from the glass, stood a magnificent deer sheltered in a stand of trees. It’s not that we haven’t seen deer in the suburbs before – they flit by on a regular basis these days. What they do NOT do, however, is stand at attention in front of an open window in broad daylight staring at me eyeball to eyeball while the vacuum cleaner’s roaring like a race car engine! Once I got over the surprise I managed to finish cleaning and dash upstairs for a quick shower. At first I hated to run the water for fear of scaring off my visitor, but it didn’t prove to be a problem. In fact, afterwards I even decided to say something to her (never mind what) out the bathroom window. All it elicited was a minimal twitching of the ears.

By the time the writers showed up a full hour had passed and all that had changed is that the deer got tired of standing and had the good sense to sit down. Dandi and Laurie, unlike me, are country girls, so you’d think they’d see this sort of thing all the time, but I guess not, as they were over-the-moon enchanted at the sight. I thought the deer exuded a feminine presence myself, but Laurie, who is decidedly more interested in body parts than I am, was convinced it was a male. I suspect now she was right, as the whole thing ended up being a one night stand. Every afternoon and early evening since, I’ve looked with great expectancy out that same window only to be disappointed.

As I’ve thought about this odd event all week it brought back another event I’d almost forgotten. Some years ago when I wrote a lot for the Akron Beacon Journal Sunday Magazine I was sent on assignment to interview an ex-Dominican nun who purportedly communed with higher beings and was able to conduct conversations with her clients' guardian angels. My friend Jessica, who has always had a yen for psychic dabbling, went along as my assistant. To tell the truth, it was a little disappointing at first. Except for the Egyptian music being played in the background for a cat who was in labor in the laundry room, the angel psychic was about as exotic as a soccer mom. I asked questions, she politely answered. At one point she grabbed a sketchpad and started drawing furiously with colored chalks, but the interview continued seamlessly, so I thought little of it. Wen she finished drawing, she tore off the masterwork, and handed it to me.

I glanced at it and then over at Jessica whose eyebrows by then had shot up to hit her hairline. To the left of the page lay a blue lake, to the right a gazillion trees. A stone path wound through the center bordered by drifts of daffodils. In the foreground a magnificent deer stood at attention gazing straight out at me. Minus the deer, the soccer mom psychic had just whipped off an exact rendering of my backyard!

“Wh-what does this mean?” I asked, a bit disconcerted.

“I don’t know,” came the reply. “It’s yours to figure out.”

And so it was, though I never really did. For a day or so after the interview I tried in a half-hearted sort of way, but then promptly lost the artwork and forgot all about it. Now fifteen years have passed and here I am suddenly thinking about it again. Crazy as it sounds, I have to wonder if the chalk drawing is somehow mystically connected to last week's deer.

I think Carl Jung's been stalking me too.

To The Library -- With Love and Lament

You would think that a bookseller flailing eyebrow deep in a sea of books would never darken the door of the public library except to attend book sales, but such is not the case. Or at least, not the case with this bookseller. I have harbored a deep and abiding love for libraries ever since I made my maiden voyage to the Goodyear branch of the Akron Public Library one cold, rainy Friday evening in October, 1957. (And no, I am not using poetic license to add details. I was six years old and I remember.) Probably the main reason this memory lives in technicolor is the fact that my aunt and my mother, neither of whom are, or were, readers, instigated this foray into the world of culture. Growing up in south Akron, reading material at our house consisted of the daily Akron Beacon Journal, Reader’s Digest and Popular Mechanics, all of which were read only by my father. So to be escorted into the serene, oak-tabled splendor of the Goodyear branch library was an event of epic proportions.

What I remember most is the hush -- rather reminiscent of the old lady, the comb and the brush, and the bowlful of mush in Goodnight Moon. In those days you whispered in the library, even in the children’s section. The other thing I vividly remember is that my friend, Isabelle, who was with us, picked out a book called B Is for Betsy by Carolyn Haywood. One look at brown-braided Betsy earnestly gazing back at me from the red buckram cover and I was sure I would die if I didn’t read that book. Izzy promised I could have it later when she was done, but even a promise from my very bestest friend in the whole wide world was faint consolation. As it turned out though, later came much sooner than I’d imagined, as she never read it at all. That week the future was pretty well determined -- Izzy became an abstainer and I became a junkie.

But something else even more memorable occurred that night we first went to the library. On the way home, in the backseat of my aunt’s turquoise and white 1956 Crown Victoria, I latched onto Betsy for a quick read by neon light as we whizzed past stores and restaurants home to Kenyon Steet (and another sorrows). Betsy’s world was as alien to my experience as a visit from the Pope, but it didn’t matter. A timeless something living inside Betsy also lived inside me. Deep in the marrow of my bones I knew this to be true, just as I knew that books unleashed a power greater even than Superman’s. I also realized that night that Betsy did not magically turn up on paper by accident. Somebody had to invent her. Somebody had to write it all down. And that somebody was Carolyn Haywood, who was an author – a writer of stories who got paid to do the most magical, miraculous job in the entire universe!

“When I grow up I’m going to be an author,” I announced from the backseat.

“I don’t think so,“ replied one of the occupants of the front seat. “Writing books is not a real job. You would starve to death.”

“I don’t care,” I said. “I’m going to do it anyway."

And I did. For awhile. Sort of. Except that I quit a couple years ago and am now a very happy bookseller. I wonder though. Is it possible that even the happiest of booksellers still yearns, maybe just a little bit, to write something that would make a child feel the way I did on that cold, rainy night in 1957?

Maybe. Well, if I'm being totally honest -- yes, I do sort of yearn. I just wish I didn't. Writing books can break your heart.

Buying Books With the Big Boys

Haven’t written for awhile, I know, but life’s been busy. I did scratch out a piece about an auction I went to, thinking it was rather breezy and fun until I realized it wasn’t even true. Oh, everything happened exactly as I described it -- it just wasn’t emotionally true. Reluctantly, I hit the delete button and never tried again for the simple reason that I had no idea why the whole thing kept dogging me in the first place. But then last Saturday night at my niece’s wedding my daughter’s boyfriend made a casual comment that triggered an audible click in my brain. What happened at the auction had very little to do with what I thought it did and everything to do with ME.

So here’s the story as true as I can tell it. The Sunday before last, Eric and I went to an auction located about fifty miles west of where the sidewalk ends. It was a beautiful day for sitting outside watching the contents of someone’s home being carted away piece by piece. If I let myself get too worked up about the passage of time I’d never go to an auction again, so if you don’t mind, I’ll move past that part . The thing that had me so excited was the promise of fifty – count ‘em, fifty -- boxes of old books. Of course, a promise like that can never be taken too seriously, as “old” in auction-speak is very often a synonym for smelly, dirty, and/or broken. Sure enough, this auction was no exception, though I did catch a few winks here and there from a stray swan penned up with the ugly ducklings. Still, my heart wasn’t exactly fluttering. That is, until I found THE BOX.

It looked like all the others, down-at-the-heels, raggedy brown cardboard. But inside lay the treasure of the Sierra Madre in the form of pristine, Easton Press editions of Roger Tory Peterson’s field guides, leather bound with gilded page edges and satin ribbon markers as clean and soft as sticks of new butter. Strains of the Hallelujah Chorus wafted through the air as I staggered to my feet swearing I would not go home without them.

Fast forward to the auction. The boxes of books sat lined up on the grass like the remnants of a rag-tag army. The auctioneer decides it’s going to be choice out. That is, everything from here to there will be up for bid at the same time, winner take however many he/she wants at the winning price per box. Fair enough – except I can’t see where from here-to-there IS. First I run to the left end of the line and, being small, try to sneak into any available holes in the crowd. No luck. So I run to the right and try there. No good either. Finally, I duck under an elbow and almost get decapitated. Try, as I might, I simply cannot get to the books! All I can do is calculate the proximity of my box to the location of the auctioneer. I do, and figure I can sit this round out. The bidding goes on until all the boxes are gone. When the next batch comes up I’m ready and this time succeed in squeezing between two men, both with the girth of ancient sequoias. Quickly, I scan the boxes. No Roger Tory Petersons.

For a second I’m confused. But then a guy three guys down from me hefts a box onto his shoulder and I catch a fleeting navy-blue-and-gilt glimpse of MY books being carried away for the paltry sum of $35. If I were less circumspect I’d have wailed like a professional keener at an Irish wake. As it was, I inwardly blamed everybody from the the auctioneer, to the phalanx of unmoving men, to George W. Bush. Right then and there the auction ended for me. Never mind that a few minutes later I was the only one smart enough to bid on, and win, a box of trash for a dollar, knowing full well it housed a deluxe book of Lennon Sisters paper dolls in magnificent condition -- the auction was OVER.

Countless times in the days that followed I bemoaned those books. Conjured them up in my mind until they darn near materalized. My beautiful books. Gone. All because of the way they ran the auction. All because of the unyielding men who never let me in. All because …

“Whenever anything comes up where Catie needs to assert herself, she always wants me to do it,” Joe says to me at the wedding. “Hard as it to believe, she can be timid that way.”

CLICK!

A terrible truth had just been revealed over the roast beef and string beans almondine. It was not the auctioneer’s fault that I didn’t get the books. It wasn’t the men’s fault either. It wasn't even George W. Bush’s fault. It was mine. I tell myself I’m confident, know how the play the game with the best of ‘em, but it’s not always true. The fact of the matter is, sometimes I’m just too ladylike for my own good.