Close Encounters of the Human Kind

I like it when the little kids toddle in, their snowy boots, their hats slipping over their eyes as they peel off their mittens.

I remember those snowy days with my own kids, how hard it was to get them coated up and out the door and car-seated into the minivan. All the stuff you had to carry. Diaper bags and wipe-ys and tissues for runny noses. The dolly toy my daughter sucked on so fiercely she lost her face. The dolly. Not my daughter.

The kids kneel down in front of the mice holes first and I kneel with them because I like to point out the teeny blue paint brush the mouse is holding and the paintings he's been working on and the mess he's made, but that's okay. He's an artist. Sometimes the mouse is a she. 

Is she real, they ask me. 

And when I tell them, yes, they believe me. 

Outside the bookstore the world is awful and growing awful-er or maybe it's always been like this and I only know it more now because the news scrolls out of my phone endlessly. 

Did you know a man hated his ex-wife so much he killed their two children when he was on the phone with her? They executed that man last week and his wife watched him die and I wish I didn't know this and I am sorry I shared it with you. 

My favorite book in the bookstore this week is a book called Ball. It's the story of the most darling adorable dog and how he keeps trying to get someone to throw him his ball. This favorite book is tied with the books How to Put Your Parents to Bed (hilarious) and After the Fall (the story of what happens after Humpty Dumpty fell and how he conquered his fear of heights. It's an inspirational tearjerker. I'm not lying) 

(And don't miss the sequel: Treat)

The other day two pre-schoolers gathered up every stuffed animal on the book shelves and lined them up on the couch and read books to them while their harried, apologetic mother nursed a baby sibling. 

Eh, whatever, I told her. Don't worry. I've been there. 

All those days nursing my daughter, her three year old brother dropping books on her head or legoes or matchbox cars. He wasn't used to sharing me with someone else and my heart broke for him at the same time I was saying, Just a minute. Give me a minute. The TV was on and the news broke in: 

A shooting at a school. 

I watched a stream of teenagers fleeing a school called Columbine with their hands up and I turned off the TV fast and burped my baby and played legoes with my three year old, freaked out, thinking about my own teaching days (only a few months before quitting to stay home with my new baby) and never ever ever did I worry about a student shooting up the school.

Did you know that there were "11 school shootings in the last 23 days, which is more than anywhere else in the world, even Afghanistan or Iraq"?  

I don't want to know this and I am sorry I told you. 

A boy reads a book curled up on the couch. A father teaches his daughter how to play chess. A grandmother comes into the store with her grandchild and I show her the book How to Babysit Your Grandma and she reads it with her grandchild on her lap. A mom comes in with her son and I point out the book Dragons Love Tacos. Later I hear the little boy giggling as she reads it to him. 

Last week a father in Kansas, a professor, a respected man in the community for over 30 years was picked up by ICE as he was taking his young child to school. He's going to be deported back to Bangladesh as an example to other immigrants. (If the first thing that crosses your mind when I tell you this story is that the man should've taken care of his paperwork, please don't tell me. I don't want to know this cold-hearted thing about you.) 

Last week we hosted a bookclub at the bookstore and a dozen kids read from A Wrinkle in Time. It was my favorite book as a kid and I still remember the story. How it was a dark and stormy night and Meg's father had been taken away and she flew off to rescue him with her younger brother Charles Wallace. 

It was really bad where their father was being held. A dark place where evil had taken over and even good people had been sucked into it, and to make matters worse, It took Charles Wallace. In the showdown the once darling brilliant beautiful boy tells Meg he hates her, and she is horrified and enraged, thinking

there is nothing you can do to fight hate like that.

Oh my God so many girls took the stand last week and told the world how their gymnastics doctor hurt them, one girl after another, telling her story, shaking and crying, and even now there are men and women closing their eyes to it and saying it didn't happen or it wasn't that bad or why did they wait so long to tell or maybe they are lying and 

I could hate these people. 

Did I tell you about the teeny mouse painting a picture in the bookstore where I work? Did I tell you that the artist who created it is named Sharon Dorsey? She works at a place called Open Door Studio where she helps artists with disabilities create and sell their art. 

Did I tell you that the first time I read A Wrinkle in Time I cried? Not in sadness, but from relief and joy. 

It turns out there is a way to triumph over darkness:

Love

and I am happy to share it with you.

The last time I worked at a bookstore

I shelved the books in the Romance section, which was the easiest section to maintain because there was only one way to organize those books-- alphabetically by author -- and I was a part-time bookstore worker. They were never going to give me one of the big, complex, multiply-segmented sections like History or Religion

or even Poetry, even though I was working on my MFA in poetry at the time. Everyone at that bookstore was an expert in something, and people all over the city would call our Information Desk line to ask questions about Whatever. What movie won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1936 or How many years did the Mexican American War last, and one of us would know the answer or we'd know where to find it.

We were basically the Siri of the early 1990's, when there was no such thing as the internet or Google and cellphones were as big as your forearm and only really wealthy and/or obnoxious people carried them around.

I wasn't always the best bookstore worker. I snootily looked down on the Romance novels I shelved and I secretly rolled my eyes at the people who came in looking for a book but couldn't remember the title or the author or really anything about it, except that it had a white and black cover.

(for the record, they wanted Where the Sidewalk Ends by Shel Silverstein)

Something people are often surprised to learn about bookstore clerks is that we were not allowed to read the books-- at least while we were on the clock.

I wanted to read everything.

But once I got over that rule, I loved working at the bookstore. I loved unpacking the new arrivals. I loved the smell of the storeroom, the wooden shelves, the rows and rows of backstock. I loved reorganizing books in the bookcases. I loved talking to people about books and asking them what they were reading and learning what was new in the book world and getting to meet authors at book-signings and fulfilling my mission

which was always to put a book into the customer's hands.

Turns out that nearly thirty years later I still love doing all of these things. The bookstore where I have been working for the past few weeks is called Cover to Cover.  It's the reconfiguration of the original Cover to Cover (my favorite bookstore of all time, which closed a few months ago when the darling owner Sally Oddi retired), now reopened in a new space by the lovely Melia Wolf, a former art teacher, which is very apparent the moment you walk through the door. 

(LOOK!! a teeny mouse nook under the counter, designed by
artist Sharon Dorsey of Open Door Studio)

(The original Cover to Cover had a wall of visiting author
and illustrator signatures. The wall went with Sally but Melia
took photos and recreated it as tissue paper!)

I am having a blast unpacking boxes and moving the books around on the shelves. Struggling, a little, to learn the ordering and computer cash register system (yes, THIS has changed mightily over the last thirty years), but the smell of the books is the same, and I will never tire of talking about books with people.

(One of my first customers, Sally! at the grand opening.)

And my new favorite thing?

Kneeling down to put a book into a child's hands.