Where Should We Shelve You?

Some notes from the front line on Black Friday: In a much appreciated decision regarding my beauty sleep, the boss had me work the late afternoon/night shift on the year's biggest shopping day, as opposed to the early, as in 6 a.m., shift, so I missed out on the doorbusters madness. Happy to report, though, that there was no pepper spraying, trampling/trampled customers, or other such ugliness. It seems that the only casualty was the toilet paper dispenser in the men's room. It was busy but not crazy, and the only real difficulty I had was with a customer over the intricacies of the words "may" and "shall" (trust me, too insipid even for me to expound on any further). My best interaction, besides seeing a good old former bookstore colleague I hadn't seen or talked to in years, came early in my shift when I asked a woman, who had the undeniable look of someone looking for something she couldn't find, if she needed any help. "No," she replied, "just tell me where you put my husband." Not as quickly as I might have hoped to qualify as a true witticism, I said, "Antiques?" She chuckled.

Which made me think of a great philosophical question, of the parlor game variety: Where would you be shelved in a pretty comprehensive bookstore? The possibilities are myriad, and I realize the answer for most of us might be subject to change at anytime, given all sets of circumstances, but think about it--if ten of your friends were asked to shelve you in a particular section, what would it be? Self-help? Psychology? Ancient History? Crafts? Science Fiction? Humor? Mystery? New Age? Auto Repair? Clearance? Meditate for three days and get back to me.

I Know My Oxy From My Moron, But Not My Parsley From My Shrubbery

I learn by going where I have to go.
         --Theodore Reothke

The boss today said it was either good news or neutral news. I'm not discounting the possibility that in time it will be good news, but neutral it is definitely not. There is nothing neutral about panic. The news is that I'm being moved from running the reference section at the bookstore to the cooking/gardening section (those who know me can stop laughing any hour now).

Reference felt like home: dictionaries, thesauri, trivia books, literary criticism, writing manuals, educational texts. Basically my bread and butter (jeez, less than one day into it and I can't stop with the food references). Now I'm headed into the two-nook shelves of Rachel Ray, paella, perennials, and landscape design. Things couldn't be more confusing for me right now if I (colorblind as I am) were put in charge of blending at a Sherwin-Williams store. I've said it before: my culinary expertise extends to clearly enunciating my order into the drive-thru squawk-box so that I don't have to repeat it, and no further. The only cooking reading I do or have done is reading the fine print to determine if I take the burrito out of the plastic bag or not before nuking it. Sure I cut a decent lawn, but colorblindness or not, I know my thumb is not close to being green. But what the hell; I can do this. If George W. Bush could go from whatever it was he did pre-2001 to being President of the United States and the Union held, I believe I can do this (sans my own personal Karl Rove, I might add). It's going to be rough at first, though. When the boss pointed out the shelf labeled "whole grains" I had to ask what the hell are those; is there such a thing as a half-grain? Upon further inspection of my new domain, I discovered that under my aegis I now also have responsibility for the Weddings and Etiquette shelves (friends, insert your own paragraphs of hilarity here). So long, Roget, hello Emily Post.

So, stay tuned. I'm sure some new insights re Martha Stewart and bonsai maintenance will be coming your way soon. All I know is I have a new-found respect for the word neutral.

Can I Help You?

Thought I'd peel back the curtain a bit here and show you all the oft-mentioned bookstore where I work. It's cozy, off-beat in the best ways, and endlessly intellectually stimulating; in a word, it's home.

And not without its quirks. We arrange the books in a kind of binary-shelving method. We have only five main sections: books that begin with "The"; books your mother would be ashamed to know you're reading; movie novelizations; miscellaneous; and origami. Within those sections we arrange the books not alphabetically by author or title, but by length. Short books on the left, long books on the right. FYI, the 261-page sub-section of each section is the largest. Of course, on that odd, once-a-month occasion when a customer comes in with exactly the correct title and author of the book he or she is looking for, it might take some time, but for everybody else (the scores who come in saying, "I don't know the title, author, or subject matter, but the book's kind of a cream color and it's about this thick," (holding out their thumb and forefinger, indicating a book of roughly 312 pages) "and I have to have it read by tomorrow for my book club," the system is amazingly convenient.

We don't have any author signings, because, frankly, who wants those kinds of people in a bookstore? Live authors, that is. Drake, the young Goth woman who runs our cafe, is also a medium (as in ghosts; her dress size is actually petite), and she offers her services gratis once a fortnight for an author seance in the back. Poe was a lot more garrulous than you'd expect, Austen a raving diva, Hemingway picked a fight with me when I innocently asked him if maybe A Farewell To Arms was a bit mawkish, and that Kafka was a stitch.

I mentioned the cafe. It's actually a small table near the water fountain (five cents a slurp, strictly enforced by Drake) with a "leave a crumb, take a crumb" plate. The restroom, unisex (we're progressive), consists of a pilfered key on a large wooden plank (Marathon station across the street, wink wink). The magazine section is filled with mags we scavenge from backpacks checked at the front counter.

Like any friendly bookstore, we have our share of alternative regulars. Alice is a card, and harmless (don't mind the flyswatter, that's just her way of showing affection); Orson gets a tad polemical, but if you hit the couch right after he wakes and trots off for the wooden plank, you can usually scrounge enough coin for bus fare home; Ambidexter's promised to reveal (figuritvely speaking, we assume) the truth this Halloween--my money's on male, Drake's vibrations tell her hermaphrodite; we're all convinced Suugeee is the one responsible for looting the entire shelf of 477-page "The" books every week or so, but she's so darn cute nobody seems to mind; Fred should be back lurking in the origami books in 7-15.

Oops, there's the sensor, got to run. Stop on by sometime. We're open occasionally `til dusk.

Everything But The Girl-Wrong

The Fall-Wrong Place, Right Time (No.2)