“What an idiot!”
The day had ended on Wednesday, April 2nd. I just wanted to get home and mess around outside. I’d just gotten a call from the shelving contractor. He’s coming on Friday with a big load of bookcases for the Gaithersburg expansion. The rest of my week would change dramatically.
Planning.
Prep.
Clearing space.
Then filling them.
I was surrounded by a herd of book carts. All filled with books I need to review.
My poor head was spinning with things that had battered it all day and things that would be pulling me in different directions in the near future.
My phone chimed in my pocket.
Again.
“Don’t call me after 5!” I thought angrily.
I’d put my time in. I’ve worked every day since the end of October—when I returned with from Amsterdam with a damaged arm. And that was a work trip.
The phone was extracted from my pocket. The number calling was unfamiliar. Its location was the “United States.”
“Spam!”
I answered tentatively.
“Hello…”
“Is this Wonder Book?”
I own Wonder Book.
“This is Chuck. How did you get this number?”
He’d found it in a trade directory.
‘Damn! Why haven’t I changed that?!’ I thought.
“I’m calling about a book I found online.”
“Oh, my. I’m the worst person to ask. There are two million here, and I couldn’t find it if I tried.”
The business has gotten so complex that there are specialists for every aspect of what we do.
The customer service people had left 30 minutes ago. Why didn’t I tell the guy someone could call back tomorrow? Instead, I overthought.
“I don’t want to sound like a jerk.” Did I really say that? That sounds like a jerk. “But the best thing to do is just buy it…”
What I was getting at was that if he really wanted the book, he should get it off the inventory by buying it. The order could always be canceled tomorrow. We’ve had a saying for decades:
“The only book you regret is the one you didn’t buy.”
That came from personal experience. As memorable as many of my purchases and finds have been, the strongest memories are about the things I have gone back for, only to find they’ve sold to someone else.
Sometime in B.C. (before COVID), I was at the New York Book Show. (It now has a half dozen names.) I was breezing through just as it opened and spotted a literary painting at Jeff and Jennifer Marks’ booth. It was pretty expensive but stunning. 19th century oil—probably the first half of the 1800s. A dark scene in a gentleman’s library with dozens of ghosts coming off the shelves toward him. Meticulous. Sublime.
“I’ll come back and dicker over it in a while.”
I thought better of it and circled around the aisle. It was two minutes. They were wrapping it in craft paper for a couple of art dealers.
“Damn!”
“… How much is it?” I continued to the customer on the phone Wednesday evening.
“$19.95. I’ll just forget it,” he said and hung up.
‘I bet he thought I was trying to peddle that book for 20 bucks,’ I thought and started steaming.
All the way home, I thought about how I could have better handled the call.
I was defensive. He’d searched out my private number rather than using the options for customer service clearly available on the website. It was my private space, but he didn’t know that. I guess he thought by using some back number whoever answered could just walk out in the 3 acres of shelving and pull the book off row locator ROH-C 237 (I’m making that up.) They could describe the book in question—though we do a pretty good description on $20 books, as opposed to basic descriptions for cheap reading copies.
I was grumpy when I got home. Changing into gardening sweats, I went out and finished pulling the mulch off the pickup. Then I got the ATV out and smoothed the stretch of gravel lane my only neighbor and I share.
The plow pulled some larger stones and deadfall branches from the roadside, and I thought it prudent to take the truck down and pick them up so my neighbor wouldn’t be disappointed with the free work I’d done for us.
Plus, I can always use stone and firewood.
I live two lives. I’m well versed in country life up on the lonely mountain. And I’m pretty good with the entire spectrum of books down in the valley.
It is Thursday morning. April 3rd. Foggy, misty, damp.
The woodstove is still warm. Yesterday was cold. Today will get to 74, so I’ll let it burn out.
Should I have someone call that number and try to get the guy what he wanted?
Will it be a case of another legend, “I called with a question, and the Wonder Book owner told me to just buy the book. What a jerk! I give Wonder Book 1 star out of 5.”
(I emailed the Org this morning and asked them to change the number in the directory to the office number.)
My editor is off tomorrow, so I need to knock this week’s story off this morning.
I watched the hockey game while having warmed up leftovers for dinner. Ovi scored goal number 892. He needs 3 more to break Gretzky’s record. They lost 5-1 though and haven’t looked good lately. I went to bed after the second period and missed some huge fights. There were 142 minutes in penalties. I hope they don’t blow the post season and bow out early.
Today, I’ll need to get the Gaithersburg store ready for the shelving delivery.
I’ve been there twice this week, brainstorming category shifts and other renovations. We are going to change the entrance. That means a new counter needs to be built.
The staff will appreciate that. The current setup is ridiculously cramped. Yet another quirk from the Book Alcove days and Carl’s 1980s construction. (I think I mentioned in a prior story that when we purchased the store in 2008, it still had a rotary dial phone. I was sad that I’d been convinced to have it replaced.)
I think last Monday was the peak for the daffodils up here. That night, there was wind and rain and very cold temperatures. A lot of them got knocked over.
But there are still plenty of mid and late season varieties yet to bloom.
The hostas are starting to drill their way up through the earth so they can unfurl their giant leaves.
And I’m finding trilliums here and there. I hope some have propagated so I can transplant seedlings to further expand their population. They are so fragile.
These ugly ones I planted last year are doing very well.
Go figure.
March 31st, 5 a.m.
Work and sleep.
Silence and blackness all around.
69 degrees inside. 64 out. The woodstove has been cold for 3 days now.
The last frost date is weeks away. April 21-30. So I will still be burning scraps of wood dragged in from around the house and barn for many days and nights yet.
I long to haul all the 75 or so potted plants outside and reclaim so much of my home.
There was a big crash in the night recently. It jarred me awake. What could it be? Break in? No security lights were triggered. I lay in the dark and wondered what could have fallen. I turned on the lights and arose and walked out of the bedroom.
Nothing.
When morning came and dawn and the time to rise and fill the window feeders suctioned onto the bay window, I saw what had happened.
The beautiful tall amaryllis had gotten top heavy and toppled. I should have staked it. I took it out on the porch. They are pretty hardy. When the remnants of the blossoms die off, I will cut the stalk and bring it back inside. I think another flowering stalk will emerge.
And, anyway, there are still 4 left blooming or sending up buds.
The weekend was glorious. Over 80 on Saturday and Sunday. We opened several of the dock doors to let fresh, warm air into the still chilly warehouse.
I threw myself at the tides of books yet again. The equation ends with the same sum yet again.
I cannot get ahead.
I spent a lot of time “in” New Orleans recently. It was around 1925. John Dickson Carr’s gothic Deadly Hall had a pretty disappointing plot, but I really enjoyed the ambience of the city during Prohibition when NOLA really flouted the law and alcohol was readily available. Apparently, a lot of it was brought in on boats and distributed in “coffee shops.”
The cars. The hotels. The clothes.
The gothic part concerns an English Renaissance stone mansion transplanted stone by stone to just outside New Orleans by a wealthy Confederate general after the Civil War. He’d illegally salvaged gold from a shipwreck.
I don’t want to give away the plot—such as it is. Suffice it to say that I had a great vacation down south, though much of it didn’t make sense.
The redbuds are coloring.
It seems too early.
I don’t want spring to race by. I’ll miss it and will need to wait another year.
On Saturday, I had a party up here.
Well, more of just a get together. I owed my winery friends and the new owners of Lorien a visit. This was the time to do it with the flowers in full bloom.
The plan was for the four of them to come up and we’d walk around sipping wine and then go out for dinner somewhere.
Then another friend—from high school—and his wife wanted to see the place, and Saturday was the only good date for them.
Then Michael Dirda was coming up to drop off 15 boxes of books in his opening salvo of downsizing his vast book collection. He hasn’t been to the house since I first moved in 15 years ago.
Plan B.
It might be hard to get into a restaurant with 8 people on a Saturday night. But I really wasn’t mentally ready to cook—not even a cookout—for 8.
Plus, the weather seems perfect.
I pass a Neapolitan Pizza place almost every time I wend my way home from work though town (I avoid the highway invariably congested in the afternoon.) It used to be a Coca Cola plant but got repurposed into condos. The Cugino Forno looks pretty authentic. There’s always a baby-blue Vespa parked out front. I could pick it up on the way home.
I ordered 3. They were pretty expensive, but the pictures looked great. I was offered a pickup time of 4:27.
So two cars followed me home. The other friends showed up a little later. I showed them around my newly organized home and then we wandered out in the gardens.
It turned out pretty well. We ended up on the deck even though I hadn’t cleaned it off. A couple of them helped me carry up chairs from the garage.
When we broke up, I was exhausted. I had thrown myself at the book carts, as well as a lot of other stuff, all day.
There was the stress factor as well. This was the most people I’d had up since COVID by far.
Since I’ve broken the moratorium, maybe I’ll do more.
Monday, late morning.
Driving to Gaithersburg to check on progress. I haven’t been in person since last Wednesday. I did make a lot of remote decisions.
Now we need more bookcases. Glass for when that style of bookcases is built. Sales counter. Alarms. Cameras…
The books are easy.
The warehouse was a zoo when I got in.
Last night when I got back from dinner, there was a huge truck blocking the dockyard where my car was parked. 3 dogs were loose. Fortunately, the gates were closed. When I went to check, he asked if he could go in.
“No. We are closed on Sunday. There’s no one here. There are dogs in there.”
He seemed crestfallen. Like, I’m gonna unload a truck at 8 p.m. on a Sunday night.
So, he was here bright and early on Monday and dropped off a full trailer of remainders. Now parts of the warehouse are jammed. It is jammed with the wrong kind of stuff.
We are low on modern “raw” books. That’s the easy stuff. Bread and butter. Much of the handling is automated. Also, it is very profitable material. The older books are more labor intensive. That’s why some mega sellers just don’t do anything with books that don’t have a barcode or ISBN.
On our way back. 75 degrees and getting hotter. All I wore was a hoodie. Maybe it’ll sweat some of the COVID pounds off.
It is looking much better at the Gaithersburg Wonder Book, but there is still a long way to go.
We are moving the sciences into the new section.
I decided to create an indoor kids’ book 5/$5 section. Ernest and I culled about a dozen tubs so it should be filled today.
Now I’m tired. I didn’t rest enough from the weekend’s exertions. But it is like swimming against the tide.
I’d like to go home and sit in the sun and maybe take a nap. I’ve heard naps are therapeutic. I vaguely remember what a nap is.
I guess I’ll rest when it is time for my dirt nap.
Tuesday
On the way back from Gaithersburg.
Andrew drove us down.
Pulled a lot more kids’ books to reduce to 5 for $5. Come in and purchase 20 or 100 and give them away somewhere…
Strange how the shop has gone horizontal with so many tables put in for display. We will be going more vertical with bookcases being built and installed soon.
This morning before going in, I finally planted the trillium bulbs I got LAST year. They were starting to send out shoots and still seem viable. I wanted to do it last night—or yesterday afternoon, actually. I left work early, exhausted from the weekend work, the party and stress. I was going to force myself to plant the trillium and also empty yet another truckload of mulch. I changed into the ragged sweats I use for yard work. The wind picked. Thunder rumbled in the distance. Lightning crackled nearby.
Nope.
The skies opened and rain pounded the driveway.
More importantly, it pounded the daffodils.
So maybe yesterday was the peak. But there are still thousands left to bloom. So many got knocked down. And a lot of the earliest ones are fading.
Sigh…
That’s how April 1st went.
Time to send this off and get up, shower, take care of the dogs and bump down to work.
I did carve out time to make travel plans.
My doctor appointment last Friday went so well that I got past the tipping point. I had a list of questions written down for him. One was drugs for travel in case I get sick or hurt again.
When I developed the bad cough in Sweden last summer, I went to a “real” pharmacy where the attendant was a mature woman dressed in a white lab coat. Her English was perfect, and when I asked for cough medicine, she led me to a wall of medications. She pulled one down and handed it to me. When I got back to the hotel, I translated it.
“Icelandic lichen”?
I left it in the room unopened.
When I got run over in Amsterdam last fall, I had no painkillers with me. The hotel had European tylenol. I just toughed it out with that.
He accommodated me. So. I’ll be armed and ready wherever I go.
Also on my list was my right hand. It was injured when I was run over, but it was the left arm that was damaged and needed surgery. The ring and middle finger on the right hurt pretty badly for a couple of months. Especially after handling thousands of books. I started taping them together, which helped. Now they feel ok. Just ok though. And there’s a lump on the knuckle. And the middle finger angles down rather than arching up when I flex it.
“It is deformed. I think you should see a hand specialist in case a nerve got…”
Groan. X-rays soon.
The redbuds are morphing from a lavender-purple haze to more brilliant blossoms. They are definitely early compared to the photos I took last year.
I went around the property, pruning errant branches on the saplings I planted over the last few years. I know I put in more than 70. Many are still too young to bloom.
I did find a lot of cool books this week.
This Paris Dining title from the 20s features Maxim’s as the frontispiece.
I was there about a year ago. Twice!
And Jerry Thomas’s iconic How to Mix Drinks from 1862 is a pretty exciting discovery—especially in great shape.
The coming week will bring more books, more bookcases, more plants to transplant. (There are a dozen or more bleeding hearts sprouting in harm’s way that need a safer location.)
I need to put marker stakes out so I’ll know where to plant bulbs next fall.
This mound has lots of bare spots.
And when I plant random handfuls in the woods to catch the eye, I call these “grace notes.”
And there’s my little symphony in my “yard.” (The video only shows about half the plantings. There are more on the other side and in back.)
And more spring.
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