Small Town Saturday Night

I had occasion to be out of the house (gasp) last Saturday evening (double gasp), so I hit up the bookstore (GA--oh wait, no, that’s totally something Elizabeth would do on a Saturday night. Never mind, nothing to see here, carry on.)

For the last several years, this particular bookstore has been the only large one in the area. We used to have a Borders--which went tits-up in 2011--and two Barnes & Nobles, both of which closed for lack of revenue. One I know was in a lousy spot and didn’t have much traffic. The second one, though, was bang in the middle of a bustling downtown area, so I don’t know what happened there. I do know of one small independent bookstore a few towns over which has been in existence for over 40 years. It’s a great store, but out of the way for me and as a result I visit it sparingly. What I’m getting at, here, is that we don’t have a lot of bookstores, I don’t go out a lot on Saturdays, and, having done those things in combination last Saturday night, I have Thoughts-with-a-capital-T.

The first thing to say is that the store was bustling. Not ‘one week ‘til Christmas’ bustling, but definitely busy. Even if the people were only in there while they waited to be paged for their table at the restaurant next door, they were there. In a bookstore. There were families and couples and old people and groups of school-aged kids and weirdo singles like me, and everyone was looking at books or book-related things. I heard the cutest conversation between a group of girls who were somewhere between 11 and 13:

“I need weird plots!”

“Like [book]?”

“No, weirder!”

“Like [book]?”

“No! Weirder!”

“What about [book]?”

“Weirder than that. The weirdest!”

I have no idea what her personal rubric for weirdness was, but I was all for whatever she thought was weird because apparently weird made her happy, and kids who are happy with their book choices are more inclined to read, and that is a Very Important Thing. Personally, I was looking for my own weird books and walked away with an $8 copy of Umberto Eco’s How to Travel with a Salmon & Other Essays.*

There is constant Internet shrieking these days about the death of small towns/businesses/downtown areas/”Whatever happened to community?!”/et-the Millennials-killed-it-cetera. To a point, yes, okay, there’s a certain level of truth to that.** I have experienced first-hand the death and attempted resurrection of a small town’s downtown. Well, the death portion, anyway. The resurrection I got second-hand from my mother while I was away at college who would explain to me in great detail how they were attempting to turn downtown Gilroy into Los Altos--and failing miserably. To be honest, I find it ironic that the screaming about how we’re losing touch with our communities because we’re so busy being on the Internet happens on the Internet. If you’re as worried about it as you say you are, get off the web and go to the local coffee shop instead--and I don’t mean Starbucks!

Let’s put these things together, shall we? Last Saturday night I simultaneously experienced two things that have been put on the ‘Endangered’ list by Internet pundits: an actual, physical bookshop that was full of people, and a busy, thriving downtown area. Two things that everyone is screaming to the high heavens are gone for good, will never come back, we’re doomed to a life of nothing but Amazon and we’ll never leave the house again...I dunno, I kinda feel like maybe, just maybe, things aren’t quite as dire as all that. Maybe. I mean, the world is still a garbage fire, horrible people are making things worse, and you can’t move for all the pointing fingers, but I saw a community last Saturday night. Maybe it was a unicorn, who knows? But maybe we should all be prying our eyes away from the shiny, hypnotic screens a little more and looking around, because apparently, things are still happening.



*Dammit, I should have looked for Bulgakov. If y’all haven’t read The Master and Margarita, you’re missing out. Come to think of it, that would have been a great recommendation for the little girl looking for weird plots...if she had been about ten years older.

**Except all that “What will the Millennials kill next?” hogwash. We just have different priorities, m’kay? And all y’all who are bitching at us need to take a step back and look long and hard at why our priorities are different. You might notice that it’s due, in large part, to what an unholy shitshow you’ve created for us to have to live with. Now go to your rooms and think about what you’ve done, and don’t come back out until you can be rational.