when you hear me speak of heaven…
Free time and car keys were ours.
Our stomachs full of our favorite barbeque, The Boy and I piled up for a tour of the old stomping grounds. There were hours to kill.
Curiously, as we drove and I pointed out the sites, I found myself in censor mode. I was in college then, and there are things he does not yet need to know, like this is where I was so stinking drunk I climbed up the front of the building like some demented Spider-Man, or this is the street where I tied a rope to the back of Hoyt’s Vega and skiied behind it through the snow. The closest I came to anything exciting was an admission of grabbing serious air on my motorcycle off the railroad tracks. Even that was tinged with dad-ness, as I reminded him that my friends and I were experienced riders, though I made no claim to controlled circumstances.
So the tour was noticeably, to me, curtailed, and we both got tired of me leading off sentences with, “there used to be…” and the thirty years have done their damage to the places of my memories.
“Let’s go in here,” I said as I pulled along the curb. He followed me through the door and stopped, blinking, his head swivelling, and I couldn’t help but grin.
The books were everywhere, floor to ceiling, little hand-lettered cards and directions stuck here and there, and from wall to wall, and between were tiny corridors that asked for a cool suspension of your personal space if you came across another person.
Behind glass, I caught site of an early edition of In Cold Blood, and my eye consumed the view of hard-loved bindings, gold leaf lettering, the very properness of this book shop, and it’s important that this stay a shop, not a store even though it says store on the window, because a store means corporate offerings and generic blandness, the touch of the accountants, but a shop still means love, an obsession with the book as a token of hope and dreams, reverence for the written word.
The Boy is a reader, God bless him, a gene I’m proud to have passed on, and his eyes took it in as his fingers gently touched the many spines almost unconsciously. We paused in a doorway, up two steps and I reached to place my fingers on his shoulder to get his attention for a moment. “When you hear me speak of heaven,” I told him, with a small gesture of inclusion, “this is what I mean.”
He planted himself in science fiction while I roamed and peered, a stiff eighty bucks for a Winogrand I’ve coveted that went back on the shelf, and I got stuck between Walker Evans and David Douglas Duncan, finally choosing neither and the little voice in my head that sounds a lot like my wife told me we were short on funds, the trip itself eating the bulk of our current budget. I looped through this grand labyrinth, thinking I’d live there if they’d let me, and I remembered one night, when were watching a movie, and one of the scenes began with an establishing shot of the interior of a home, and there were piles of books and overflowing shelves and no flat surface not occupied by books, and The Wife said to me that is what our house would look like if she left it up to me, the truth of it echoing through my heart.
I could not deny The Boy, though, when he asked to buy two books to read on the drive home while I had to content myself with some photographs and a silly memory of our time here together.
on June 9, 2009 at 11:25 am
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Awesome.
I had a bookstore like that, back in college, but it’s gone now. When I go back, I can’t even remember which shop it was in, exactly. Pretty sure it’s either a law office or a pizza place now. Sigh.
DH and I are both readers and I was sure the universe would send us kids who weren’t, just to mess with us, but both the girl and boy LOVE to read. Thank goodness. I can never say no to buying them books, and they know it!
Badgers most recent blog post..Solar oven FAIL
on June 10, 2009 at 11:35 pm
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yeah, not many of them around anymore. This one, however, seems to be going strong. Gotta love a good college town.
on June 10, 2009 at 6:28 pm
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Just two days ago in our T.V channel that plays old shows I happen to see the first Twilight Zone episode–the one with Burgess Meredith.He plays a meek bank teller who wants to read all the time and no one lets him.He finds himself in the Twilight Zone the last person alive in the world and in a giant library.But alas,he breaks his glasses.Now you should be hearing the theme music of the show.
on June 10, 2009 at 11:35 pm
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oddly enough, later in the day my glasses did explode. coincidence?
on June 10, 2009 at 9:38 pm
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Reading, as you know Cog, maketh a full man.
on June 10, 2009 at 11:36 pm
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as does eating
on June 11, 2009 at 2:56 pm
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Hence, Dumas with mustard and cheese on rye. One of my favorites.
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on June 12, 2009 at 1:08 pm
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pere or fils?
on June 11, 2009 at 4:35 pm
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I think I’d have to move in there with you. God, I love the smell of books.
on June 12, 2009 at 1:12 pm
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we’ll have a very quiet party
on June 15, 2009 at 11:03 am
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If you ever get to Columbus you must check out The Book Loft. Really nice book shop in a 32-room Victorian house. You can get lost there (and not mind).
Also, a book recommendation: “A Short Walk in the Hundu Kush” by Eric Newby. I’m reading it for the second time and it struck me as being the kind of book Cog would really enjoy. Best ending ever for a travel book
on June 18, 2009 at 10:33 am
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I’ll have to order that one, Gromit. Looks like my kind of book.
Isn’t Columbus near Mid-Ohio?
on June 15, 2009 at 11:04 am
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P.S. If you do go to Columbus let me know and I’ll meet you there. I haven’t been to the Book Loft in a while…
on June 18, 2009 at 10:33 am
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will do