The Used Book Store

Yesterday, I spent a little time at my favorite bookstore. The store was quite crowded. Most times, there are few people. I don’t like sharing my old book store with other people, I like to go up and down the aisles and pull a chair up, blocking the aisles, and look through the books. I want to spend hours in the stacks of books and get what I want and look for the things I will get next time. This time I bought The Oxford Dictionary of Phrase and Fables, You never know when you will need to look up a fable or a word or a phrase, I also bought a book on Hawthorne and a Joseph Campbell book on Japanese mythology, I think that will be my favorite.

But, while I was there, I met a woman who drove down from Missouri to attend some kind of school reunion and she always comes to that bookstore. She says it is the climax of her trips. She showed me the many books that she bought. I was surprised, she didn’t look like a fan of folklore nor did she look like a fan of eastern religions. I say, I’m impressed with your reading choice, and she says I am really getting into the eastern religion thing and I am always interested in folklore. I find that she is a professor at a university in Missouri and that she has her PhD in comparative literature. I should have known, fifties, long straight hair, no make-up, generic clothes and shoes, and a T-shirt that expressed certain distaste for the way the government is being run. She also had this beautiful crystal hanging around her neck as well as turquoise and silver and I say Navajo and she says yes, the three sacred stones. I knew I had met my new best friend. She took my email and I her email and we both promised to keep in touch. She told me when I finished school to find my way up to Missouri that they are in dire straights for good English/Literature professors and I promised I would check them out first.

Later, my husband and had a discussion on Hawthorne that started when a friend was here, but after she left we continued. For a change, it was nice to talk and argue about literature and not fight about money or who does what and who has the most responsibilities. Mr. Zelda’s favorite writer is Hemmingway and no matter what literature we discuss, he brings Hemmingway into the middle. It’s nice to know that while there so many reasons to keep me depressed there are books and they can, for a short time, take my mind off of NO and Bushwackers and the stress of just being.