Guidance

There is a bookstore in town that is known for its oddness, although it’s surprising how few people even know it exists. It’s not the only one, but it’s the strangest. For one things, no hours are posted anywhere. The owner just sets up a sign with an arrow on Maine Street. The arrow points up a street perpendicular to Main; it’s one way, going in the direction opposite the sign indicating there’s a bookstore nearby. The sign attracts only the attention of foot traffic, however. 

That is fortunate, because there’s no sign for the bookstore on the building that houses it; just the one on Main Street is there to send customers down the one-way street about fifteen feet, where they stop and figure out the gravel driveway isn’t really a place for cars but is rather the way into the shop. That’s easy enough, but the path - now fifteen or twenty feet long, leading to a barn like building, doesn’t actually lead to the right door. The door on the right is the wrong one. It no longer opens and shuts. Customers must go slightly to the left, where the ‘real’ door is. A real door to a real barn, one might say. 

This could be called The Book Barn, had the owner chosen to give the place a name. Kind of like the one in Orrington or maybe it’s Orland or even Orono - Maine likes names like that. Or maybe it’s only happenstance. Maybe the gravel and its doors appears and disappears, like mushrooms pop up and fly off or shrivel when weather conditions are right. Since it’s doubtful the building has any heat other than the unit near where the owner sits and which is definitely the worst fire hazard ever, a visit on a fall day might be rushed. 

There are only narrow spaces to walk, wobbly, dust-laden, uneven, and unlit passageways. This isn’t a whole barn but a side corridor, unless there is a way that leads to the rest of the building, which isn’t a day younger than 1850. I’d give a couple of centuries, and I want to tell the gruff-looking owner who scared the dickens out of me the last time, sitting or lurking as he was on the steps to a small section I’m always afraid to explore. 

I went this time while in a fairly agitated period of my life. My remedy is often to go on yet another solitary expedition, hoping to find entertainment in the little things. This time I talked to the owner and bought a book. I want to tell him you can’t charge for grime, but don’t want to hurt his feelings. He might be a veteran, judging from some of his comments. He explained that his buddies sometimes came to jam in the little courtyard not far from Main Street. I marveled that no neighbors complained, but was wishing I could go some time when they got together. I’m like that. I don’t always know my place.

While at the store (shop? Barn?), I took a few discrete photos of some of its quirks. There was the long, blond, very fake-looking wig hanging in a window next to a vertical outlet where numerous lamps could be plugged in but weren’t. There were the cupboards that might have held books (or something else), with scalloped lower edge that framed the light coming from the other side. Were customers supposed to see these things? Were they for sale? Nearby was a green door, freshly painted but with a raveled lower edge. What was on the other side? In another area there was a coal hod, empty and clean. Next to it, a book titled ‘Running’, sitting on the floor, waiting to take off into the next room. Except after two steps, you’d run into another wall of books.

I’m tempted to continue describing the bookstore, but it would be hard to do that without another visit and finding it open is so hit-or-miss. I ended up buying a 1950s reader like there used to be in elementary school, with stories and illustrations. Why would I be drawn to that? If I read it, then what would I do with it, useless old thing.

Then it came to me, after a friend saw it and laughed at my caprice. I found myself defending what I’d done:

“I have purchased the ability to relive fragments of my early childhood through word and image.”

It sounded silly, pompous, defensive, and I knew it. That didn’t stop me from sitting with book, losing track of time. Lots of time. Reading the dusty old thing was a waste of hours, considering that it took only about twenty minutes to go through it from cover to cover. 

My friend texted the next day to see if I was still wasting my time or wanted to go for coffee and a croissant. I thought it sounded like a good reason to put the book down and left the house. In the café I was able to explain what had happened to me.

“Memories. That’s all it was. A bunch of childish memories.”

My friend nodded. Maybe she understood after all. She asked:

“Are you trying to recover that simplicity? The one we don’t realize exists when we’re children?”

It was that easy and that obvious. I needed to declutter both heart and home, which the years had worked hard to clog. If you think the jump from the childhood reader to cleaning out my current life is a big one, just trust me. The illustrations and dialogues had come floating back in an avalanche and I was suddenly aware that my present situation was desperate. My survival depended on getting back to the land of childhood, of Oz, even.

I knew there were lots of methods: KonMari, Irma Bombeck, YouTubers who’ve developed a decluttering method, OM and other meditative practices. There was help out there if I could just locate it. Which is why I decided to return to the bookstore. It took several tries to find it open, but I was finally successful. I found a book on how a person can clean up her act, as they say. It was published about thirty years ago, but it was perfect because it made no slick promises and it worked. 

What did it lead me to do? The organizing and downsizing conversation is pretty boring. What isn’t boring is how it made me feel. Even my friend noticed the difference.

“You’re smiling. Do you have a secret I should know?”

No, I did not. My depression lifted, I was happy, my energy back. I spent more time walking. I was reading more, eating better. One thing leads to another, they say. My friend was skeptical.

Since good things come in threes, I wanted to return to bookstore. This time my eyes landed, not on a book but on a fan. This wasn’t a fan like you wave in front of your face stupidly, playing the part of a Spanish señorita. It was a fan that was in fact a greeting card, maybe from the 1890s. There was writing on it. Handwriting as well as verses. The verses were over-the-top sentimental, but they too were in cursive, which reminded me of how nobody learns that any more and made me furious. 

I didn’t really like the words or the art, and they were from long before my time, but their essence was still in the way they marked time, told time, caressed time. The minutes and hours did not get away from the makers of these objects. My fan was either a birthday greeting or an exquisite valentine. I don’t recall. But I did know it was something extinct, too slow, too elaborate, too textual to be created nowadays in a world of oil and bombs and quick decisions and no everlasting love that needed declaring in such beautiful ways that the echoes would reach me a century or more later.

Then something happened, because I started to study things I’d never wanted to learn. I made Chinese thread books, bowls made of papier-mâché and painted, found a very clever use for all the corks I’d been collecting for years. 

Finally, I took the space I’d gained from downsizing and created a whole pantry full of canned tomatoes, pickled peppers, corn relish, and more. I learned how to quilt, using my grandmother’s very old Singer sewing machine. I know time was much shorter than when I’d first encountered the school readers, one of which had inexplicably appeared on a shelf of the bookstore that really wasn’t a bookstore but I couldn’t put my finger on it yet and maybe didn’t want to.

Then a huge thought came to me and suddenly I was deathly afraid. My life was so perfect, and I was fighting the urge to make it more perfect.

I knew there was only one way to move forward, one way to sustain what had begun, but I was afraid. Afraid to go back to the old bookstore. Afraid?

That makes me sad.