Ye Olde Bookstore

Yesterday I drove through pea-soup fog to an old three-story bookstore in a town nearby.

The building is huge, old ,packed with used books in the basement and attic, and new books on the main floor. Three cats, one of them currently pregnant, roam each of the three stories. 

 I wander around this bookstore probably two or three times a year and always, I spend most of my dreamy hours there in the basement and attic scouring the shadowy shelves of used books. The owner turns the lights on for me in the basement then tells me to call him when I’m ready to go upstairs. Later he walks up the creaking vertigo-inducing staircase with me to turn those lights on, too.

Nearly always I am the only customer.

This 77-year-old bookstore has been in that 10,000 sq. ft. building for over 20 years. The son of the second owner now runs the huge shop along with his wife. The scary thing? They're the only life in what has become a ghost-town street.  I’ve watched a video showing women in the 50's wearing hats and starched dresses crossing those same streets with shopping bags over their arms and similarly-clad daughters at their side. Men in sports jackets hurried, also, to hardware shops, I suppose.

But now there are only silent, empty storefronts all down the line. Sometimes before getting out of my car to go inside the bookstore, I stare down this street and imagine that I see those people of 50 years ago, but simultaneously, I spy reality: dilapidated buildings, some still with former business names permanently stamped above the doors. A few storefronts even have marble slabs at their thresholds, with fancy store names in gold cursive lettering. The sidewalks are now abandoned, except for crumpled leaves and yellowed newspapers rustling past.

Of course, I can buy favorite old books here at home from online any day of the week--and I often do. It’s the easy way. And though the people who sell them are rather faceless and nameless to me, I still realize that they, too, need my business.

But there is such a thing as supporting a local business because it is local and because I’ve met the owners. And in this case, I care that this business in that eerie part of town not succumb to death like its neighbors. I don’t want to someday park in front of an empty building and picture myself, ghost-like, shopping there when it used to house a 3-story bookstore.

It’s fun to give. To be mindful to be a blessing, as the Bible puts it. Even if we never received anything back, it would still be fun, adventurous and rewarding.

But we do receive back.

And of course, spending a few dollars at a quiet, old bookstore isn’t a Big Thing. It’s not like I’m helping make this world a better place by shopping there. It’s not as though I’m making a difference in people’s lives.

Or am I?


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Life can be just life. Or it can be gracious living…… Francis Gay