I just looked around and it was Wednesday. They appear to be tearing down my favorite tobacco barn in town. This barn is on one of the only two roads into our town, which is in a bend of the Connecticut River. The landowner, who lives next to this parcel, took advantage of rising land prices two years ago and sold several fields to a developer, who is now building new houses on them. I know things change, but damn- this was the first tobacco barn you saw when driving in from the main road. In past years the high school students had posted a mural on it. It was an old barn, with a beautiful slate roof (which they are salvaging). It's just too damn bad.
But the more things change, the more they stay the same. Our blogging friend Here Today, Gone Tomorrow, has started a baby registry for our newest blogger, Angry Ginger.
Looks like Rush Limbaugh, yes? Well, the Angry Ginger is actually much more photogenic than that, ands to help us make his/her early years better, I urge you to visit here.
When you've been in the book business for ten or twenty years, your customers start to die. I've had dozens die, and re-sold books we sold to them over and over, but this week it really hit me. This client was not somebody we sold books to, but somebody I bought books from. She was an ex-antique dealer, who had had a shop on The Vineyard for many years, and now lived in a nice apartment in Boston. I've been buying books from her library for maybe ten years now. She'd call, say, come on in and see some more books, and I go and buy a half dozen shopping bags full. The money went to her grandkid's college fund.
Norma always talked about books, antiques, The Vineyard, the Red Sox, and her dog, a mop-top with a bouncy personality. When her first dog died she was heartbroken, but then she adopted a new mop-top, and he was the love of her life.
Her death was unexpected. She'd always told me that she'd left instructions that her kids were to call me if she died, that I was to come and buy her books, but she was one of these really energetic, bouncy people who you never really expected that to happen to.
7 comments:
I've lost several of my very good customers from the bookstore days in just the past couple of years. Fortunately, I've been able to put the widows in touch with book dealers who bought a lot of their books. They're grateful but it's still sad.
With my own set of family members, my grandmother, mom, and my Uncle who was closer to me than my dad, passing in the space of twelve months I had enough death myself. We, and mean the entire country, all need huge heap of good news about something but I'll be damned if I know where it might come from.
Sorry about your friend. It's frustrating when the good people pass on.
And sorry about the barn, too. It's another kind of passing.
Sorry to hear that, at least she died happy, the Sox won.
Sorry for your loss. Maybe you should buy AngryGinger that gun he wants so bad to take your mind off of it.
I'm sorry. Still, no one gets out a alive. My mother, who's dealing with cancer treatments, has a really great attitude about all of this. Her gentleman friend is all concerned. "Do you think you're going to die?" he asks her. Her answer? "Yes, Bill, I'm going to die... and so are you."
It's so sad to lose people like that from our lives.
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