An Ode to Secondhand Bookshops.

So, I thought it was high time I dedicated a post to the haven of all literature and history lovers: the secondhand bookshop.  Is there one of us who can walk into a room full of dusty old tomes, ripped comic books, and back issues of Good Housekeeping without feeling that little thrill run through our innards?  Personally I skim over the comic books and Good Housekeeping, but I do know others who are as thrilled by them as I am by the dusty tomes.


Chewelah has, as do most small towns, its own particular gem in this area, made up of a deli in front and a wilderness of old (sometimes soiled or moldy and always dusty) literature behind.  I can never eat at the deli, because the old book smell permeates even the dining area and the atmosphere resembles a cross between a bad school lunch-room and your grandmother's closet.  However, I often go through to the back and spend a considerable length of time riffling through the clutter... for it's one of those delightful places with very little order and a goodly number of cardboard boxes.  I've found some of the best treasures in said cardboard boxes, particularly the ones under the "25 cent" shelf.  There I discovered copies of Thomas Costain's The Darkness and the Dawn and Elizabeth Goudge's Gentian Hill, among others.  Semi-forgotten authors, but none the worse for that.  It was through this place as well that I became familiar with the work of Anthony Trollope, and when you can buy Plato's Republic for a dollar it really seems a shame not to read it.  So you see, a great deal of credit for my post-high-school education is owed to the dusty back room of a deli.

Belonging

Song lyric of the day, from Deb Talan's The Gladdest Thing:


Doesn't each of us have a place where we belong?  Could be a sidewalk crack or a sad song.


The song came up on Pandora this morning at work, and that line caught me.  Everyone can think of a place like that, somewhere they felt at home, at peace.  Elizabeth Goudge, in Green Dolphin Street, referred to it as one's own "special country", as a state of mind given shape as a place.


For me as a child I found it in the branches of a particular tree.  Since then I have found it many places, from the banks of the Teifi in Wales to an empty parking lot, a full auditorium to a dim cedar grove.  They are the places and the moments when I feel I have most truly lived, times and places where doing was not required, when simply being was enough and more than enough and the distortion of life as we know it was gone, when action became superfluous and speech banal.


To live always in those moments would be to live in heaven.

Recollections on a Rainy Day

This will be a short post, as I spent most of the day crafting query letters to send to literary agents, and my brain is fried to that degree that only a walk in the rain can save it now.


This time of the year always makes me feel close to my childhood.  Chilly autumn days gathering firewood; evenings curled up in the couch-corner reading Lloyd Alexander, Elizabeth Goudge, or Susan Cooper, and imagining myself into far away places...  I was always a fairly contented child.  My mother remembers that I could spend hours by myself playing with bobby pins.  I remember it very well too.  I nearly always pretended they were keys -- magic keys that could open any door.  I would unlock all the doors and go through and have adventures.  We never had many toys growing up, but I can't remember ever really caring, so long as there were books and bobby pins.  The only exception, I remember, is a secret longing I had for a Chia Pet, so that I could cut it's hair off and have it grow again.


Strange how books from childhood stay with you.  For me, at certain times of year, I always feel compelled to re-visit certain favorites -- Elizabeth Marie Pope's The Perilous Gard in the Autumn, Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising in Midwinter... Anthony Hope's The Prisoner of Zenda at any time of year.


I want to be that kind of writer.  The kind people keep coming back to.  George MacDonald said, "I do not write for children, but for the childlike, whether of five or fifty or seventy-five."  The best books are the ones we keep coming back to, no matter how our lives change or how we age or mature.


But now the rain is calling.