My daughter, I used to work in a bookstore, and I loved everything about it. Actually, I met your mother for the first time as I was running to make my shift there. So, it’s permanently tied to very important pieces of me (and you). I don’t know what bookstores will be like when you’re older. I fear most of them will be nostalgia shops good for an antique visit to days gone by, but not part of your daily life as they once were mine. Maybe “bookstore” will just be an online institution, which is fine because I’m glad you can buy authored words somewhere. But in my day, bookstores were brick and mortar buildings that served a central part of many peoples’ lives. They were abundant and they were amazing. When bookstores began closing by the multitudes, most people easily handled the loss. The only thing permanent for them was the purchase of books, and they never lost that, it just shifted to the online jungle. For some of us, we experienced a cry worthy heartbreak. For us, the best stories were never the ones on the shelves. The best stories walked between the shelves, curiously exploring for the right book that spoke to them. They came hoping for answers to difficult questions, such as the man who asked me for books about euthanasia because he needed to decide whether to take his grandmother off life support or not. They came to have a garden of words to wander, such as the man with Alzheimer’s who visited our bookstore regularly because it was a place that stirred memories for him. They came when they had nowhere else to go, like the wife who’d been told to read a book on female submission in order to save her marriage, yet wept (happily) and poured out her own story to me after I suggested a more empowering book to read in tandem. Those kind of human interactions now happen in different spaces. Our need for them is permanent, and we will seek them out wherever we can find them. Thank God that we can indeed find them elsewhere. Still, I wish our bookstore was permanently that space. It had its own unique life where stories walked the aisles looking for pages to add to themselves. Today, there’s another bookstore still in that building, and while no doubt it’s an important place to the new management and their community of customers, it can’t replace the old one for many of us. I miss that place, as I miss a lot of things that are forever lost to time. So listen my daughter, your life will be packed full of many relationships, friendships, romances, wonders, and adventures you will wish were permanent. You will fight to keep them alive and for a period of time you will win. When that turning point comes, though, when you know that person, or that beloved space, or that house, or that job, or that nostalgic way of life is going to leave you permanently, I want you to hug… I mean really BEAR hug the beautiful memories deep into your soul, into corners of yourself that you may not always venture, but you know when you do it will be as lovely as finding the perfect book, one that you can sit down and read again and again and again, forever moved by stories that have taken a permanent place in your heart.
March 3, 2016