Thursday, December 19th

I awoke at 4; I don’t know why. Black room. Black window. Black mood. Black sky.

It is almost 7 now.

Several pages in the journal filled. News sights. Instagrams posted. (Why do I bother?) Tea. Dogs out. Dawn is brightening the world. Sunrise is not til 7:25.

I need to take the big blue recycling container down to the county road. I don’t want to miss the pickup. It is full—mostly with empty plastic bags that the garden soil came in. They won’t be back for two Thursdays.

We are hurtling toward Christmas. The stores are full of people. The online sales have been huge. But mail order will slow when even expedited orders won’t be able to arrive in time. The world—well, that’s parochial—the world around here and throughout the US has evolved into delivery vans and small trucks everywhere you look. There are boxes often set on the ground against front doors or on the ground in front of many of the mailboxes.

Sometime a text will come from one of the neighbors inquiring if anyone has their package that the delivery company assures them had been dropped off. (Somewhere.)

Then there will follow a dozen or so texts from other neighbors and their spouses, mostly saying, “Sorry. Not here.”

I avoid using my country mailbox. Too risky. I have as much mail and all packages sent to the warehouse.

But often there are packages at the foot of many of these posts. It is not unusual to see them in the rain or even overnight.

The truck bumped down the mountain, and the recycling container was dragged off and set in line with the others.

I need to get back up and plant some bulbs. There is a hard freeze this weekend, and the ground may get too hard to dig. It is late to be planting. Last year’s excuse was Portugal COVID. This year’s is Amsterdam Arm.

So much to do…

But I love the life I’ve lived up here. My own “Walden Mountain.”

Though the container was full, there was little “waste.” I do binge on canned fizzy flavored water.

(Will they say that is unhealthy now?)

But otherwise there is little trash. Any paper—not much—goes in a box to go to the warehouse to get recycled. (Except for “clean” paper which I use to get fires in the woodstove going.) The dogs eat most scraps. Anything they don’t eat goes out for composting.

I did manage to get all the remaining daffodil bulbs in the ground.

That garden needs some more topdressing, but that will be easy enough.

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It is Friday already.

It is cold. 34 outside. I made sure the fire in the woodstove was alive and stocked for overnight.

The turkey was put in the oven to roast when I got home last night. My son met me at the theater to watch The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim at Warehouse Cinemas across from Wonder Book on West Patrick Street (Rt 40.) It was the second time I went to see it this week. It was good. We went to the 3 p.m. show so he could get home to help with his baby.

(Three grandchildren in 15 months! After all these years…)

The movie was as fun the second time as it was the first—last Tuesday. The way for sequels was left open at the end. That’s good. For me, there’s never too much Tolkien in the world. Indeed, while the turkey was roasting and I was eating leftover Thai food, I watched the end of The Hobbit “trilogy.” In the last couple months, I’ve spent many happy hours watching and rewatching the first two seasons of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power and The Hobbit.

For me, that is time well spent.

For me, it has been a Tolkien life.

When I was a child, my brother Jim came to my bedroom and tossed the paperback Ballantine editions of The Lord of the Rings trilogy onto my bed.

“You might like these. They’re full of elven spit and dragon snot.”

I was soon hooked. I recall vividly reading them by flashlight under my bedclothes so my parents wouldn’t know I was still awake. Since then, Middle Earth has been an ongoing motif in my life on paper and on the screen and even in music.

It was announced yesterday that Alex Ovechkin may return to the ice as early as next week. He had a fractured leg on November 18th. He is pursuing the all-time scoring record of 894 goals held by Wayne Gretzky. He is 27 shy of that number. Amazingly, he had already scored 15 goals in 18 games this year before his injury.

Tomorrow morning is the Winter Solstice (see below.) Very cold weather will arrive right on cue. Saturday’s high will be 33. Sunday 28. Monday 33. Lows in the teens. Winter’s bite seems deeper now for some reason.

It hurts.

There’s no forecast of snow on Christmas, however.

Work has dreary the past week. People problems. Big online issues out of our control. These things suck the spirit out of me. At a certain level, some things can’t be delegated. The joy of bookselling devolves into the torture of business administration and accounting.

I’m watching for the arborist to come. I’m getting an estimate on vista pruning. The forest keeps growing and encroaching on my view to the horizon.

Now that the gardening is done, I can focus on things like wood gathering and mulching. Maybe I can find a spot to put a new garden bed in.

Just keep putting one foot in front of the other…

And the circular ATV trail through my property! I haven’t ridden it since before COVID. I know it has to be cleared of fallen trees and branches. That would be a worthy project.

Well, I’m at work. The arborist asked to postpone because of his back. My back started spasming this week.

Sigh…

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“4 days 16 hours 56 minutes and 41 seconds” til winter.

I searched “First day of winter”, and a countdown clock was the first result. Almanac.com.

Further down, it reads the Winter Solstice occurs Saturday, December 21st at 4:21 A.M.

It is Monday, December 16th. About 7 A.M. I’m bundled up warm under blankets and sheets and a heavy faux fur rug I bought 14 years ago when we had a huge 6-figure wrapped book order for the Restoration Hardware chain. 113 stores or something like that. It was a big secret.

Outside, it is 34 degrees, but last night’s snow is already melting into the earth. The long steep driveway which was covered when I drove home in the dark last night is wet and black.

The sky is a dark gray featureless curtain.

The three dogs are curled up on the bed between me and the widow looking east.

The fire in the woodstove is just coals. I remember stoking it with plenty of big logs last night. They seem to be burning faster than in previous years. The only change is the new catalytic converter I put in. Well, that and I put in new gaskets on the door. Is more air getting in?

There’s no need to build it up though. The day will warm to 50 degrees.

How do all the homes and businesses and schools keep warm down in the valley? Almost 300,000 people live in the county.

Technology.

And a world growing exponentially all around me.

Mysterious drones are in the skies not too far away.

Who’s in charge?

My view looks out on the flight path for Dulles airport. I remember that when I first noticed them, I thought they might be aliens. The lights don’t seem to move. They extend north in an arc. Sometimes I can see 5 or more “UFOs.” If you watch long enough, they do move. But they never get low enough to appear to be airplanes.

It was a wonderfully fun weekend playing with books. It is a frenzy to see how much I can get done during those precious hours when there are few interruptions and interactions in the vast warehouse.

I raced against time and exhaustion on Saturday and then again on Sunday.

I left each day full of satisfaction. I know now the supply is virtually endless. Time will run out before the books do.

And still I reach out for more and more.

A friend from New York dropped off a load of “vintage” books last week.

6 pallets of them.

He’s a bookseller with a large shop. These are old books he can’t market. (Actually, they are worthless to him.) I offer enough for him to save them and drive them all the way here when there’s a big enough load. At some point this week, these will be carted up, and I’ll review them. I’m not looking for mistakes. Every bookseller has different feelings about books. I know we make mistakes. You can often tell when we get flooded with orders for a single book. If it catches my attention, I’ll take a look and wonder what we missed.

Usually though, I’ll just see a book that I believe in enough to put it out there for sale. Maybe I like the author. Maybe the binding is strikingly beautiful.

I got a text from my son on Saturday. An older couple had brought in a set of Grant’s memoirs.

“And it’s actually signed!”

A lesson I learned decades ago, and a mistake that comes up every 5-10 years.

Ulysses Grant was poverty stricken and dying of cancer. His family would be left destitute.

Mark Twain was a close friend and helped with the project. With Twain at the helm, 350,000 copies of the set were “pre-sold”—mostly by traveling salesmen.

He died before the books were printed. The set was such a bestseller that his family’s fortunes were secured.

So although 350,000 copies or more bear his inscription and signature, they are all facsimiles. So, ALL copies are “signed”, but none are original autographs—unless his ghost did some.

Long ago, the local newspaper published a story. It had a photo and story of a local auctioneer who had discovered a signed copy of Grant’s memoirs…

I see this morning that the couple sent me images of “Grant’s Memoirs.” I’ll have to break the news to them. No matter what, it won’t look good.

One of the lucky finds this weekend was this book with a nice inscription by Armand Hammer.

As usual, it was just a fluke that I opened and looked inside.

Hammer was one of the 20th century’s most colorful characters. Columbia medical school. Lenin’s “pet capitalist.” Faberge eggs. And finished with a convoluted oil relationship with Gaddafi’s rogue Libyan dictatorship.

He established an art museum in LA before his death. For some reason, I’ve never gone. Van Gogh, Rembrant, Picasso, Goya, Sargent… and one of the best Daumier collections outside of France.

I guess I didn’t know it was there… lol.

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Tuesday morning

I awoke at 4; I don’t know why. Black room. Black window. Black mood. Black sky.

Gray and wet again. There’s a big smoldering log in the stove. I was tired when I got home last night and didn’t have the motivation to build a good fire. I knew today it will get up to 57, and I factored that into my decision to let the house stay kinda cold.

Yesterday ended well after a pointless first few hours.

I stopped for a blood test on the way in to work. Once there, it was emails and people problems. Confusion. A call to my prescription insurance’s 800 number per my rep’s advice. I spoke to someone in south Asia, I think. The accent was so thick I could barely parse the words. “You are late… $3 fee…You are on autopay… Last payment was November 30…”

“How can I be late if I just paid in a couple weeks ago?”

“…”

“How can I be late if I’m on autopay?”

“…”

“Is my credit card up to date? Can you check?”

“…”

I think my phone call was to India. 2 hours of my life gone forever.

I was finally transferred to a Senior Account Rep who barely had an accent. He told me I was all paid up and everything was fine. I didn’t ask why the text from Walmart says my refill is ready for $400. I’ll find out when I pick it up this morning. It was just over $100 in May.

Then there was the owner of the little free library whose books were being stolen.

Hi,

I’m a Frederick resident and long-time WonderBook fan! I’m contacting you with a slightly sensitive situation and hoping for your consideration.

I have a Little Free Library in front of my house. If you’re not familiar with the concept, the library is stocked with free books and the concept involves sharing books with people who then replace the shared book with their own book donation.

Within the last 3 months, my library has been totally cleared out of books 4 times. I suspect the person is taking the books to sell to secondhand bookstores, like WB. I have started blacking out the barcodes on my donated books in an effort to prevent this behavior. I know from selling books to your Frederick location that your staff generally don’t inspect individual books but instead offer a price based on quantity. Would it be possible for your staff to quickly check books for blacked-out barcodes and refuse to buy them?

I was previously reluctant to contact you with this issue as I respect your business and love having such a wonderful resource for book lovers in my neighborhood. But in the past I have bought books to share with my neighbors and if this continues, I will have to close the library.

I understand if you aren’t able to change your business model to address this issue but I at least wanted to make you aware of this behavior, as it might impact your ability to stock/inventory your books.

Thank you and Happy Reading!

She thought perhaps the thief was selling them to us. I replied, suggesting that it wouldn’t be worth the thief’s time to bring them to our store for a few dollars and that stamping them with “Not for Resale” would render them valueless.

We couldn’t inspect common books coming in. On a given day, we can get a few thousand. EVERY day.

I bet some other little library owner is pilfering them to keep their library stocked. lol.

The response for the lease deal came and was “hardball.” Not what I expected. Back to the drawing board.

And, etc…

I was feeling so down that I thought, ‘Why not go deeper?’ I faced off against the remains 6 carts of German books.

It was torture, but had to be done. I did the best I could by them. The managers at the Gaithersburg store will groan at the 3 boxes of German books I sent to be showcased. Faulkner, Henry Miller, Camus, more Hesse… all “auf Deutsch.” Someone in data entry will be groaning when faced with several shelves of German titles I’m instructing them to “force” on. Annika doesn’t know yet about the dozen or so I thought merited a bit of research.

“Could these be first German editions of Dostoevski?” Would it matter?

A small package came in from an old high school friend I don’t think I’ve seen for 40 years or more. I was much closer to his brother and hear from him pretty regularly. He included a small vintage hardcover French-English dictionary. My signature was on the front pastedown.

I have no recollection of ever having the book or how it would have gotten to him. But it was good to hear from him. Maybe we will link up somehow. I hope so.

I fled after 4 to meet a friend at Warehouse Cinema. I was a bit early for The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim. I bought a gin and tonic (breaking a two-week long dry streak.) Then a big bag of popcorn. She arrived and got a G&T. We went in and were the only ones in the theater. We sat through interminable ads and previews and finally the movie began. I had very low expectations. The rating was 2 out of 5 stars. It is an anime film. It has nothing from Tolkien except they are using his “world.” However, it is produced by Peter Jackson, so I’m sure there’s quality there.

Over the next two hours, the film grew on me, and by the end, I was hooked. Surprisingly, it satisfied me. They finished with some strong hints at sequels.

Then we went out for pizza.

A happy ending to a long frustrating day.

Why do I put myself through so much unnecessary frustrating things?

It is time to shower and then head out into the fog.

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Friday at work. Late morning. More worries and problems to address. Working with books seems more and more distant today.

I did take this 18th-century cookbook I found yesterday to Annika. I thought it might be good. But as a later printing, it is only a couple hundred dollars good.

She had researched the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead first edition I’d sent to her. That book, an early work by Tom Stoppard, is a valuable item.

Mr. Gibbs, my English/Humanities teacher, took us to see a production of the play in high school. How lucky I was to have a teacher like that.

Life changing.

She had some other good finds qualified for me and ready to go to the store’s glass cases.

Ridgley and Terry have sent in a LOT of Christmas cookies. They spent some time as professional bakers. They would deliver pies to iconic DC restaurants until the labor got to be too much.

More important to many of you are the three cases of Goo Goo Clusters that came. Lots of hard to find candy and drinks at the stores.

Think of someone beside yourself for these treats!

The phone dug up this image and prompted me with the “Memory.”

That was with two retired doctor friends in 2019. A St Patrick’s Day event.

It is just over 5 years. I look so young. What happened? COVID?

Tuesday evening, I drove to Virginia to see my new grandchild born on December 10th.

He is a gem. It is a reminder of what really counts in life. Family. Friends. Life.

But books are not “dead” things.

I’ve been very lucky. I’ve worked very hard for some of that luck.

It has been a good run.

This time of year, it is a good time to count your blessings.

“One, two, three…”

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Below is the beginning of a stream-of-consciousness blog I started a month or two ago.

I’m not sure it is going anywhere, but since it was already typed up, I thought I’d append it here:

In a small city on a small planet, third from a small insignificant sun, there was a small bookshop.

In the scheme of things, everything about it was small.

The “scheme of things” was the vast universe. Perhaps only one of thousands of millions of other universes.

But that is too great a concept to consider.

And, really, one universe at a time is plenty. More than plenty.

This bookshop had existed for many years. A long time.

But in the scheme of things, a mere blink.

Actually, far less. A fraction of a blink. A minuscule fraction.

But consider the mustard seed. Or, if that is too small, the acorn and the great oak that may grow from such a small seed.

(Fairies need great oaks in which to live. The question may be posed, “Does the oak need the fairies, or do the fairies need the oak?” But fairies live in another universe almost entirely, and rarely do the bookshop’s universe and the fairies’ universe coexist in the same space and time. It is all very confusing, so let us just try to wrap our heads around one universe at a time.)

The bookshop.

On the outskirts of everything. Outside the big city. Outside the outskirt of the little city of which it is a part.

But, to some, the bookshop was a big place. Millions of books.

To one, the bookshop was the center of the universe. An egotistical thought. A fantasy.

But in this big little bookshop, insignificant in its region, less significant in its country, much less in its hemisphere…

…In this big little bookshop, in its cluttered office (where a befuddled bookseller would sometimes wander) upon a cork message board on the wall before the desk, there hung a ring.

There were smaller things in the office. And bigger things. Certainly in the bookshop. Things beyond comprehension in the solar system and the universe that this solar system is just a “blink” percentage of.

This ring was of great weight. If its true weight were realized, it would pull down the office wall, the bookshop, the building and fall through the earth until… until there was no place left to fall.

Such big things are difficult to contemplate.

Let us rather consider a simpler thing. The bookshop and the millions of books gathered inside it.

Or simpler yet, the bookseller who was kind of a shepherd to those millions. Tasked with keeping them dry and in every other way protected from the elements, which sometimes raged outside the bookstore’s walls.

(As for the forces which raged beyond the walls and skies and clouds, see the paragraph above about fairies and oaks and acorns…)

The bookseller. Therefore, had a monumental task. But in the scheme of things…

Have you ever tried to shepherd one dog? One cat? A half dozen cats and dogs? Ten? One hundred? Things become more complex as the number of digits increase.

The bookseller was thinking big thoughts like these one chilly fall evening. He was standing on the large wooden porch outside the front door of the bookshop that seemed so big until he turned and gazed upward at the starry sky.

‘I will never get there,’ he thought. ‘When I was a boy, I was sure I would travel to the stars. Too late. Too late. And too, too far away.’

(To be continued perhaps.)