Lamenting the loss of pages, a cover and a spine, but getting the drift
- Michelle Wood: SWCD
- January 11, 2010
- 840
If not dangerous.
“Corporate decision,” she said, answering a question I imagined she’d grown tired of hearing. “After downsizing, well, there’s only one other choice.”
“Doesn’t seem right,” the young woman in front of me said. “It’s always been such a nice store.”
And so, this little town, which my wife and I have called home for 10 years, will be down to a single bookstore soon and, though I realize that the Great Recession has gobbled up more important places of business and will doubtless cost many others their jobs, I couldn’t help the melancholy that seeped into my consciousness as I wandered through those soon-to-be-empty shelves.
Actually, I wouldn’t even have been in there on the first Saturday of 2010 had my wife not insisted on it.
“How many of those gift cards have you got tucked away?” she asked, knowing my penchant for not even trying to use things like that until they’d expired.
“I don’t know,” I said. “A few. Maybe three.”
“Find them,” she said. “All of them.”
“Why?” I asked, knowing my afternoon of watching bowl games was going the way of a Notre Dame national championship.
“Because everything’s 40 percent off,” she said, “and the store is closing. Maybe tomorrow.”
Certainly, she was right.
So I ventured into the stereo room and sifted and sorted through the pile of birthday and holiday gift certificates that I’d stacked behind my Bernie Williams baseball card (which includes a sliver of a bat he’d used to hit a home run to beat Boston on Sept. 7, 2003) and below a replica of John Glenn’s Friendship 7 space capsule.
“Got ‘em,” I said, pocketing all three.
“Let’s get going,” said my wife, packing her Kindle.
And off we went.
But ... wait a second.
I should tell those of you who may not be familiar with a Kindle just what it is and then you can appreciate the irony of my wife’s using it as I wandered through a bookstore that was about to close its doors forever.
A Kindle is a wireless reading device that enables the user, in this case, my wife, to read books without actually buying books. What I mean is, everything’s downloaded into this machine and, for a price, any title you care to own is delivered within seconds of ordering.
No more pages to turn: it’s done by pressing a button on the right side of the screen.
No more books to move from place to place: every title weighs nothing, words are just images.
No more need for a library.
Or a bookstore.
Or a shelf in a grocery store with paperbacks.
No way to tuck Catcher in the Rye or Brave New World into the back pocket of your jeans and walk down to the water’s edge for an afternoon’s reading.
Now, in the interest of full disclosure, I’ve enjoyed using my wife’s Kindle. There’s certainly a convenience factor that has to be lauded.
But, as I walked into the bookstore, which was more crowded than I’d ever seen it before, I was struck once again, by the beauty of books.
Their physical appearance ... the way they looked lined up, one against another, on six or seven shelves, stretching from the floor to the ceiling.
For a moment, I flashed back to a place just outside the campus at Notre Dame, a narrow storefront that housed thousands of not only used textbooks, but a universe of novels and non-fiction, stuff like Hunter Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America, not to mention all the Carlos Castaneda a person could rationally (or irrationally) consume.
It was called Pandora’s Books.
“I love the name of your bookstore,” my mother wrote in a letter that fall of my freshman year. “I’m glad it’s there for you.”
Pandora’s was the antithesis of the “official” campus bookstore.
Instead of security cameras, it had incense burning.
Instead of Muzak stifling the air, it had the Grateful Dead playing through the speakers.
Instead of cash registers, it had cigar boxes.
Instead of uniformed employees, it had freaks.
And miles and aisles of books and magazines and newspapers -- underground and out of town -- not to mention a fine front porch, a place where I could lean my bike before I walked inside.
All that raced though my mind as I walked into the doomed bookstore last Saturday afternoon, determined to use those soon-to-be extinct gift cards on a stack of literature.
It took two trips for me to exhaust what those digitally encoded cards allowed me to spend and in the end, I drove home with six novels, enough to carry me through nasty January, a month that saw the death of both my parents, 18 years apart.
So it’s a cold time ... nothing, I’m sure, compared with what you’re dealing with back home, but it gets down into the 20s at night and the winds have been howling fiercely since the old year died.
May the new one be good to you and may you continue to keep reading, no matter the medium, no matter the device ... just as long as you and I can get together once a week.
Beyond that wish, I’m ready for anything.
Mike Dewey can be e-mailed at CarolinamikeD@aol.com or snail-mailed at 6211 Cardinal Drive, New Bern, NC 28560.