Sunday began normally enough. I had to get to the warehouse early to let the three or four kids in on time. Travis was off this weekend, so I was the supervisor. Usually my job is to supervise the supervisors. This weekend, I was in the trenches.

Good for me, I suppose. Grounding.

But it is also a distraction. There are questions that I can’t fob off on someone else. If anyone needs supplies or pallets moved, I’m the go-to person.

At least Sunday was going to be a short day. I had tickets for Paul Simon in Philadelphia. I figured if I left by 2 it would be a safe bet to get there, check in to the hotel, maybe have some dinner and cross the street to the Grand Old Lady of Locust Street.

But back to the books.

I got up early to pack and get stuff ready for the dog’s overnight in the big outdoor pen at the warehouse.

When I was ready, I headed out. I’d be cutting it close. It looks bad for the boss to show up late to a small crowd of people waiting to be let in. (It was very small. Only 2. The other two were later than I.)

I had an excuse.

That tree actually extends 6 or 7 feet on either side of the lane.

At first, I thought about driving over it, but after my recent wreck, I didn’t want to chance more damage. I thought about backing to the house and getting a chainsaw but wondered if I couldn’t muscle it off.

It was pretty heavy and awkward, but eventually I was able to lift, swing and drop it on the verge.

At work, I was under the gun to get as much done as possible before my early departure.

Work, watch the clock, work…

Then a text came in from my friend in Philly. She sent a photo of an Inquirer newspaper story saying the concert was canceled due to Simon’s back pain and that he’d be getting surgery on it soon.

I contacted the hotel to cancel my reservation, but they wouldn’t hear of it.

“We’re not affiliated with that concert.”

Hmmmm…

So instead of eating the prepaid room,I texted my friend, and she said she’d loved to luxuriate in the fancy center city hotel I’d booked. She’d send pictures.

It registered mixed emotions. I wasn’t looking forward to the 3-hour-plus drive on a Sunday afternoon. But I’d really been looking forward to seeing him. Many of his songs are part of my life—like since I was 14 and my first love and…

April, come she will
When streams are ripe and swelled with rain
May, she will stay
Resting in my arms again

June, she’ll change her tune
In restless walks she’ll prowl the night
July, she will fly
And give no warning to her flight

August, die she must
The autumn winds blow chilly and cold
September, I’ll remember
A love once new has now grown old

I told the people working they could now stay til 4:30 if they wanted.

They replied essentially, “Thanks but no thanks.”

But that meant I had a couple of golden hours alone in the warehouse—like the good old days.

I loved the solitude. Just me and the books “Mano a Mano.” Almost at the very end of the day, I was rewarded with this find.

A limited edition of John Milton poem manuscripts in facsimile.

I stopped and leafed through it. On the final page, I found it.

Perhaps Milton at his most emotional and romantic. A blind man seeing his beloved dead wife in a dream.

Sonnet XXIII: Methought I saw my late espoused saint
Methought I saw my late espoused saint
Brought to me, like Alcestis, from the grave,
Whom Jove’s great son to her glad husband gave,
Rescu’d from death by force, though pale and faint.
Mine, as whom wash’d from spot of child-bed taint
Purification in the old Law did save,
And such as yet once more I trust to have
Full sight of her in Heaven without restraint,
Came vested all in white, pure as her mind;
Her face was veil’d, yet to my fancied sight
Love, sweetness, goodness, in her person shin’d
So clear as in no face with more delight.
But Oh! as to embrace me she inclin’d,
I wak’d, she fled, and day brought back my night.

One of my favorite poems. Top ten, certainly. Maybe top five.

---

July 1st.

What happened to June?

Well, there was the car wreck, of course.

I couldn’t do much work because of it. Except for the tens of thousands of books I struggled through that month.

And the progress on the new store.

July 2025. The future is here.

The dogs are melted onto the bed next to me. They don’t want to get up. I don’t either. But there will never be another July 1st 2025, so I should do something with it.

Bryan is driving us down to Gaithersburg. I was there on Monday as well. I’m going to ask him to price 30 or so boxes of books to take some of the pressure off the storage area. They have so many projects going on down there in relation to the expansion that they’ve fallen behind. This means we can’t send as many books down from the warehouse. Also, there are not as many fresh books getting up on the shelves. AND they still have plenty of empty shelves to fill.

My spatial creativity wasn’t turned on yesterday for some reason. Too many happy/sad memories from a comment from a person who frequented the store a long, long time ago. She wrote about the last blog.

Did I remember?

Vividly.

She and her sister were otherworldly. I felt as though they were fairy folk honoring my little rustic shop with visits from… another world.

And then they would walk out the door with their finds and disappear.

And then they never came back again.

I don’t remember that.

How do you know when someone is never returning unless they tell you?

Of all the cruel facts of life, I believe time is the cruelest. In my mind’s eye, I can go back to those times. They were hard times. Money was scarce. The bookstore’s survival was not assured. I’d put my paychecks aside so my 2 or 3 employees could cash their tiny checks.

But it was a good age. The store’s slow but steady growth gave me reason to hope that I’d not created a folly.

If you want a taste of what things were like back then, there was a series of fictional stories I wrote here for nearly 7 years. Round and Round 1 begins it. If you like it well enough, you can click on “Next” at the end to get to #2. Things kind of get wrapped up on #5. (But there are now 46 Round and round stories. Two more are waiting for my final tweaks.)

Sigh…

Sigh…

The Gaithersburg store is looking better and better! They had their best month ever in June.

BOOM!

(I would hope they’d have big months. We’ve invested a great deal in the last few months. AND there are probably twice as many books, DVDs, CDs, LPs there than last March.)

I had Bryan price 25 boxes or so and just stage them on some empty bookcases.

“Label this section ‘NEW ARRIVALS’, please.” (I know that’s fudging a LEETLE bit, but they are indeed new arrivals. And that label provides an excuse to the customers as to why there is no order in that section.)

---

It is Wednesday, July 2. Sleep eluded me most of last night. I did dream I was visiting J.R.R. Tolkien. He was quite elderly and frail but insisted he wanted me to take him out for a walk. His assistant, a mature woman, was reluctant but eventually helped slip a big overcoat over his shoulders. We started to leave, and then he tottered and fell backward into my arms, but when I looked down, there was just a book in my hands.

A poem also came to me in the wee hours.

The Ugly Garden
I can do nothing with you
But that it turns to weeds
I plant I prune
I mulch and rake
And when I return
You’ve given in to brambles
Winding vines strangle survivors
And I gaze upon you defeated
One sour patch
In an Eden of beauty
A cautionary garden
A bed that cannot be made
But I must fight on
Lest your chaos spill
Out and into and onto
Order and beauty

Ernest is off this week, so most of his carts fall to me. I’m numb to it. I’m still thinking of a way to offload some of the burden—that is when my mind is given time to think. Something will come to me. Or perhaps the problem will take care of itself. I guess it is a sign the business has outgrown me. That is a good thing. It will, by necessity, force some issues.

All the rain we have had has helped force me to rest my knee. It seems to appreciate that I stopped aggravating it.

All the rain we’ve had will make the yard work that much more difficult when I feel I can go out and face it.

Fortunately, the forest takes care of itself. I just need to stay out of its way. And most of the gardens I’ve put in are self-sufficient. This tiny “pocket” bed I put in during COVID was originally on bare forest ground below the deck. Now the hay-scented ferns are swarming around it. I’ve done nothing to encourage the fern explosion, and I hope it continues—as long as it doesn’t swallow up the dogs or the house.

The tiny garden is surrounded by ten or so mountain stones. In spring, daffodils burst out of it like a living bouquet. Now a hosta I put in 4 or 5 years ago fills the garden in summer. Its huge leaves leave no room for anything else. I think there was a lily in it for a couple of years. That’s apparently been choked out or dug up and eaten by a chipmunk. My northern bedroom window looks out on it. It certainly draws the eye, though there are dozens of hostas of various hues of green and shapes of leaves in nearby beds. Perhaps it is a bit defiant in its solitariness.

“I am a plant that has its own private garden.” Kind of like the rose in The Little Prince.

Well, not exactly. Upon closer inspection, there are two dark green lily stalks. I couldn’t see them from my bedroom window because deer have stripped every leaf off.

The dogs would always keep the deer away. Mostly by depositing their scent around the property, but they’d also explore a wide perimeter around the property. Now they are older, they don’t wander as far. When I let them out, they no longer hightail it into the woods. They usually select their spots closer to the house, do their business and then lobby at the door to come in and lie down.

---

Thursday, I slept in til 6. It feels good.

The windows are closed against heat and humidity, so it is dead silent in my bedroom.

It is recycling Thursday (every other one.) The huge blue bin on two wheels is pretty full. I think I haven’t taken it down since before the car wreck on June 7. Sometimes the pickups come early, so I slipped into sweats and clogs and bumped down the mountain with it. I live small up here. There is no trash pickup. Organic material gets consumed by the dogs or tossed into the “glen” of daylilies that slope down from the south porch and upper driveway. I don’t toss anything that would attract raccoons (a.k.a. Trash Pandas) or worse. The stuff disappears among the tall fronds and is soon “disappeared” by the millions of earthworms that thrive in this leaf (dead) covered land. All the paper I take to the warehouse. I know that stuff really gets recycled.

Now I’m back on my back in bed trying to push along this week’s story a bit.

We got a nice little mention in The Washington Post. The story was about things to do in nearby cities on the Fourth of July weekend.

5 D.C.-area cities and towns to spend July Fourth
Fritz Hahn

July Fourth falling on a Friday is the perfect excuse to get out of D.C. These Independence Day activities make for a fun day trip—or an overnight excursion, if you prefer.

[…]

The day-long Frederick’s 4th party takes over downtown Baker Park, with multiple stages of entertainment; gardens featuring local craft beer, wine and spirits; a children’s area with rides and inflatable games; cornhole and pickleball tournaments; food and drink stands; and, at the Schifferstadt Architectural Museum, Colonial games and food. Gates open at noon, and fireworks are launched at dusk. The park, which spans both sides of Carroll Creek, is steps from the boutiques and antiques stores in the heart of Frederick.

Where to eat and drink: Wye Oak Tavern, the newest restaurant from hometown chefs Bryan and Michael Voltaggio, “might be their best restaurant yet,” says Post critic Tom Sietsema, with pot roast and beet salad among the dishes earning raves. (Psst: Get there between 4 and 6 p.m. for “social hour” with $10 cocktails and small bites.) A few blocks from the park, White Rabbit Gastropub pairs a selection of top regional craft beers with some of the best Detroit-style pizzas in the area.

Side quest: Need a new beach read? You’ll find one or several on the seemingly endless shelves of Wonder Book, which boasts that it’s the largest bookstore on the East Coast, with more than a million books, comic books, CDs and DVDs in stock to browse.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2025/06/25/july-fourth-near-dc/

The story treated Annapolis, Baltimore, Fredericksburg and Great Meadows similarly.

I have no plans for the 4th besides going through books and maybe testing my knee with some gardening. Maybe I’ll see the grandkids at some point.

Yesterday, there was a stampede. The vast herd of book-laden carts surrounded, engulfed me. I coulda been trampled. What a way to go.

Ernest is still out. Caryn was out on Monday. I went to Gaithersburg on Monday and Tuesday, so the backup was monumental.

So much of my day was spent on them. (So what else is new?)

At day’s end, I met a group of retired doctor friends for happy hour at the venerable Red Horse. I was mostly a fly on the wall listening to their stories and anecdotes of the good old days when the trade wasn’t controlled by insurance companies and government bureaucrats. Then they started in on stories of the generation of doctors who were old when they were young.

Fascinating.

It made me think of my MD/PhD father and his medical practice and research labs when I was a kid. Medicine seemed advanced to me as a kid in the 70s and 80s. It wasn’t. My father would take me along on house calls. I got to see how so many other people lived behind front doors that would normally be shut to me.

Andrew is driving us down to the Gaithersburg store. This will be my third trip this week. I wasn’t planning to go, but looking at my emails in bed this morning, there was one from the contractor:

…attached is the bill!

hope you are mended and doing something special this weekend!

i am not…………got deathly ill monday (day we closed on dad’s house)
had thoughts of not making it…………..
today was rough but we did it!

all shelves are installed, the kids shelves are switched and reaffixed

the were turned into HOMOSOTE[*] DEMONS!

APPRX 25 book ends are done a la patricks plan

the stereo wires needed reaffixed and what a nightmare
the speaker box is way past its prime and needs upgrade
with all the stereo that goes thru wb we ought to upgrade the system
i used tape to make it work
it was tedious and frustrating, as we completed the troubleshoot…

(* Homosote is material we use like corkboard—to pin stuff up.)

I had no idea he’d been there. So now I need to go down and see what he hath wrought.

The new bookcases will need designations.

Sigh… I had other plans.

But this should be the final large installation. There will be fill-ins and tweaks, but in general, the bookstore is in its completed form.

Good. I won’t be on call as often. I can rest my creativity as far as bookstore layout goes.

I can use some rest.

…some other time.

I’ve been putting off a lot of things these past 4 or 5 months.

I am tired.

Obsession can be draining.

Summer is in full swing. The brilliant spring green of the trees and other flora along the highway have become a little subdued. The leaves are mature and hardened. There’s been enough rain that the grass doesn’t show any browning. That will come later. August.

I’ll be glad when Ernest is back tomorrow. I’m tired of being unable to keep up with his carts as well as my, now perennial, problem of being unable to catch up on my own.

We have an order to supply book props for a movie. I can’t go in to details but they are for an elderly New England woman’s personal library. Worn books from the 1940s to the 1980s.

Easy as cherry pie. (Is cherry pie easy?)

Well, we are almost there. Will I be thrilled or disappointed with the unexpected changes?

It looks great. I figured a way to move mass-market lit to the back wall so it will be next to hardback lit. Brilliant!

(Why didn’t I think of that a month or two ago?)

Not so brilliant.

The window treatments aren’t on yet.

I haven’t heard from the floor coating people.

The new bookcases have created some dark spaces. We will need some more lights.

Back to Frederick.

People are flocking west on Interstate 270. It is the Fourth of July Migration. The highway is packed—all 4 westbound lanes. We are creeping along at 25 mph.

I’d like to be home in bed. The A/C on. The ceiling fan wafting cool fresh air down upon me.

I found a perfect copy of John Dickson Carr short stories.

They’re just delicious. I’ve read 90 pages in the wee hours of last night and the night before. I’m anxious for more.

“How will he solve this one…”

Where are these people going?

The mountains?

Deep Creek Lake?

Visiting mom and dad in Western Pennsylvania or Ohio?

Getting outta DC for sure.

I wish I was going somewhere.

Or home.

Damn! Why didn’t I take a chance back then?

Scared, I guess.

---

Friday, the Fourth of July. It is supposed to be a beautiful day.

The night was filled with chaotic dreams. I would be somewhere, wake for water or to get up or for the dogs and then want to go back to sleep and return to the dream, but of course, it was gone. I was seduced into reading two stories in the John Dickson Carr anthology. There’s only a 60-page “novelette” remaining in the book. Then I’ll have to find something else to read.

Last Friday seems so long ago. Where was I? (The same place.) What was I doing? (The same thing.)

Ernest is supposed to return today. That’ll take some of the extra pressure off. But I know I’ll need to send him to one of the stores to pull books for Books by the Foot orders. I just couldn’t get to them.

Here’s this week’s BBTF newsletter. Annika produces them usually. They’re fun. Filled with color and all kinds of books.

She also put this newsletter together for the stores. It is about an Aisles of Wonder episode. #7 in the first season of 10 episodes. These are produced by a professional company (Falling Squares.) Each features a customer doing a show-and-tell in the store talking about books or movies or comics or whatever things excite them about the stuff we offer.

The drive home last evening was dreadful. The roads were packed. Everyone seemed to want to get away to somewhere else. My usual shortcuts were backed up, and I found myself switching routes a number of times before I was able to get on US 15 north where the traffic wasn’t horrendous—except for the backup caused by someone rear ending someone else.

When I got home, I didn’t want to aggravate my knee—I’d put it through a lot that day—and this week. But something made me look into my old desk now relocated to the downstairs library. It is a kind of time capsule. When we demolished my old office in the Frederick store in 2017 so we could put in more bookcases, I had it moved to my house. That office had been pretty much mothballed since about 2003 when I moved my personal HQ to the warehouse on Monocacy. (That warehouse was demoed in 2015. It is now the site of a Walmart, Chick-fil-A and Starbucks.)

Why did I move?

Wonder Book’s business shifted from the brick-and-mortar stores to mail-order internet sales in the late 1990s and early 2000s. It was more important to be in the warehouse than in the back of the bookstore.

But I spent many years at that desk. There are lots of memories and book history associated with it.

Something got into my head that last evening was a good time to delve into it.

Sigh…

Remembrance of times past.

It is stuffed with stuff I thought worth saving or were “important” way back then.

Lots of old pens and pencils. Lots of tchotchkes from publishers and movie companies.

These oddball things brought back people and times.

The pin was something we gave to employees after 2, 5 and 10 years. This one has 2 emeralds, so it would have been a 10-year pin. Why did we stop making them? I don’t remember. They were expensive. Gold plated… I don’t know if people really cared about the recognition in that form. “Cash would be better.”

At this point, we’d need four 35-year pins. (Plus another for me?)

The keychains actually glow in the dark. Can’t find your keys? Turn off the lights.

The matchstick pens must have seemed like a good idea at the time. Fire and books. Brilliant. They were cheap though. That way, we didn’t mind too much if customers took one as a souvenir for writing a check.

I didn’t get too far. Just part of one drawer. I could dump everything in the trash, and my life would be no different. But faced with things one at a time, they can evoke attachment—I’m sure it is in the DSM somewhere.

The books this week? I went through so many, and the pressure to keep at it was so high that I really couldn’t stop and “smell the roses.”

I made this pile on Ernest’s table.

They are better, collectible books that will greet him when he returns this morning. They’re books I felt comfortable enough to use my instincts to price.

Alice in Latin?

I don’t remember seeing these before.

A lot of books went to Madeline and Annika.

A lot came in the mail from friends I missed seeing at the Portland Rare Book Show.

A lot of “worthless” antiquarian continued to flow in as well.

Our storerooms are currently overflowing. But if history is a judge, we will get cleaned out before too long and will begin seeking them out again.

Keep in mind… if we didn’t do what we do, most (or all) of these books would have been destroyed.

Some will go to this designer who is returning to the store today to fill out this gorgeous display.

(We will credit them and announce the location when it is opened.)

The Fourth of July. It reminds me of smuggling firecrackers—unbeknownst to my parents—on visits to Niagara Falls in Canada. The trouble I would have gotten into if they had caught the 10-year-old me doing such a heinous crime. The years in Pennsylvania sprawled on the grass in the backyard with 75 or 100 guests at the annual party we somehow put together when the kids were little. Now the view will be the lonely views of 8 or 10 community firework displays I can see from my perch up here on the mountain. The distant “poppoppoppop…” that so disturbs the dogs.