At the Bookstore

I work hard to resist sentimental impulses and indulgence in nostalgia. Ours is a sentimental age, and at the same time an angry, unforgiving age. One strain of sentimentality especially prevalent among the aging is a rueful, self-pitying lament for what no longer exists. This might include manners, linguistic turns, obsolete technologies, movies “when they were still good.” The world we grow up in tends to become the only world, indelibly pressed into our sensibilities. Deviation from the template is second-best at best. I’m sympathetic but understand how tiresome this sounds to younger people. Part of maturing is accepting that which seems shoddy or meretricious, a falling off from previous perfection. 

My niece’s daughter turns two this week. Hannah tells me she loves to “read,” so when I arrive in Cleveland on Wednesday I want to make a birthday present of books. I’m giving her the copy of David Wiesner’s Tuesday (1991), a wordless picture book loved sequentially by all three of my sons, and read – or, rather, spontaneously narrated -- a thousand times by me. Most of the dust jacket is missing – evidence of its popularity.

 

I wanted to include a couple of new books. I haven’t set foot in one of the retail chain bookstores in many years. Books represent the only sort of shopping I’ve ever enjoyed. So I entered a Barnes and Nobles located just a few miles away, with the customary sense of anticipation I feel whenever entering a book collection. I phrase it that way because I get a similar tingle when entering a library. I’m always hopeful when it comes to books.

 

I would estimate that fifty percent of the visible stock didn’t qualify as “book” or even “reading material.” I’m not naïve. I’ve shopped at Barnes and Noble before. I remember in Albany, N.Y., in the early nineties, when a B&N opened just blocks away from a Borders (R.I.P.). If one store didn’t have what I wanted, I would drive to the other. On Sunday, the Barnes and Noble recalled an unholy merger of grade-school classroom and tourist trap – coffee mugs, tote bags, stuffed animals and other toys. Merchandise.

 

I rode the escalator to the second floor where the children’s book section is located. A clerk was standing at the computer, entering data for the heaps of board books stacked on her counter. I asked where I could find books by writers – favorites of my sons decades ago -- whose names I had written down. All were unfamiliar to her. She never made eye contact. As I read the names, she entered them into the digital catalogue. Nothing showed up. I thanked her and explored the shelves myself, and eventually found two books I thought a little girl I don’t know very well might enjoy. I felt the way I feel when leaving a shoe store.