If you took the time to sit in a somewhat worn, blue,
cloth-covered chair, surrounded closely by books like ‘Buddenbrooks’ by Thomas
Mann and ‘The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullars, and so many other
titles that I will not recount, what would be the point?
I suppose that you might consider putting yourself in my
place, for that small place was indeed mine for short time on that afternoon - although perhaps ‘occupied’ might be more
accurate. A few books that I had picked off the shelves were settled on my lap
and I had opened one and begun to read.
A young man, his brown hair pulled back in a short
pony-tail, stepped near my right shoe which I had propped up across my knee.
His face was tanned and smooth, his eyes searching for a book.
The young man carefully worked his way around me, alternately
standing or bending down onto one knee and turning his head to read the some of
the sideways titles on the spines in my little cove of books. After looking for
a few minutes, he stepped out past several round wooden tables with their small
stacks of books like the hour markings on the face of a clock. And then he was
gone - out through the far front door.
It hardly matters - except that it is so – that there are
two front doors into The Dusty Bookshelf in Lawrence.
And then a young woman with smooth shoulder length black
hair and glasses with stylish plastic frames and a brightly colored summer
dress that stopped just at her knees wandered in and out of my distractible
gaze. And there were some uncounted other
wanderers, people looking, sometimes picking up a book to page through.
And from time to time from where I sat comfortably, I would
hear Manda’s bright voice over my left shoulder as she conducted business from inside
the central island, that U-shaped counter piled high with books yet to be
processed.
I have not begun to tell you everything of my afternoon. For
example, there was the sound of Manda’s boots as she strode over the hard
carpeted floor among the many colored books - shelved and stacked and waiting. Or
how the leaf-filtered daylight shone through the front windows and around the
book faces that looked out at the street. And I did not see Dinah, the black bookstore
cat, anywhere around that afternoon.
Books are not dead and that afternoon, every person that I
saw was at least a generation younger than me. And on the recommendation of a reader
who is a generation older than I am, I decided to go ahead and take along with
me the copy of ‘Buddenbrooks’ that I had been paging through briefly. It’s
about the lives of some German people – although perhaps ‘characters’ would be
more accurate - who lived some time ago.
I had store credit from books I had exchanged on other
afternoons.
I sit here often.
