Fox Books Redux

As I type this, I am currently on hold with the local Borders bookstore. Not my bookstore of choice, but the only choice right now. Weirdly, I just found myself experiencing a Meg Ryan moment out of You've Got Mail. Our local independent bookseller, Davis-Kidd, closes at the end of December (the stacks are a zoo), and so my only choice for a new book is the overwhelming chain bookstore with the undersized parking lot on the busiest section of Nashville road. Actually, come to think of it, Davis-Kidd had pretty much morphed into Borders by the time it decided to close. But there was something comforting about the fact that I could call them up and ask about any book, and the employee on the other end of the line would know more about that book than I did.

Today, my request to Borders for a particular memoir was cause for several transfers. No "A ha!" moments on the other end of the line, no commentary about my choice. They did find the book for me just now, but as I sat on hold I was reminded of the big chain bookstore drama in You've Got Mail. The scene that causes the most alarm is when Meg Ryan's character watches a clueless employee fumble for lack of knowledge in the childrens' book section. My friends with children are the most distraught about Davis-Kidd's closing; they had the best childrens' section of any bookstore in town.

Here's the thing: books are cause for intimacy. Why else would so many people belong to book clubs? Borders or Barnes & Noble or (god forbid I ever go in there again) Books A' Million are not places that cultivate intimacy.

I found this Linda Pastan poem several weeks ago, and I've been waiting for inspiration to post. After fighting the traffic, duking it out for a parking space, and finding myself numbed by the Borders aesthetic, I hope I'll still feel this way.

"The Bookstall" by Linda Pastan

Just looking at them
I grow greedy, as if they were
freshly baked loaves
waiting on their shelves
to be broken open – that one
and that – and I make my choice
in a mood of exalted luck,
browsing among them
like a cow in sweetest pasture.

For life is continuous
as long as they wait
to be read – these inked paths
opening into the future, page
after page, every book
its own receding horizon.
And I hold them, one in each hand,
a curious ballast weighting me
here to the earth.

Linda Pastan