There’s actually a lot of unfinished business when it comes to memories of my family’s old bookstore. (For Part 1, please refer to my posting two back from this one, titled “The Back Room.”) I haven’t told you my memories of the front room, which made up most of The Book Center’s space. That’s where we kept all the customers — and the books. I won’t arrange it spatially this time; I’m just going to tell you a bunch of impressions willy-nilly. It is, after all, October, a time when things fly wildly and madly about.

This year’s first jack-o’-lantern, which I carved on the night of September 13, 2013 — a Friday the 13th, by the way — for the BookFest the next day. To my knowledge, I have never carved a jack this early in the season.

And that’s just got me to thinking: memories are like autumn leaves, aren’t they? They’re things that have had their life before — things that have played out. The living juice is gone from them; they’re so easily lost, blown away on the gale, trodden underfoot, forgotten — so brittle — so soon they can lose their shapes. Yet they are also loose from their moorings. They no longer grow in that one place, in order, like they were lived through. Now they are free to scatter and overlap and arrange themselves as they will. A memory from the tree’s crown may lie half-beneath, serving as the border for, a memory from the middle, from the bottom. And the leaves are far more beautiful now than when they were alive, for the green worry and business have gone out of them; now they are crimson and golden and orange and amber, made perfect with their victory and their completion. Now they are part of the great carpet upon which we live, reordered anew as we perceive them from our current vantage. When we scuffle our feet, we never know what may turn up, sudden and vibrant, perhaps to inform us. We spend our days upon a tapestry of treasures. And now, together with the multitude of their fellows, they become that “leaf-mould of the mind,” as Tolkien put it, that rich bed from which stories grow “like a seed in the dark.” From that seed our lives sprout and flourish — the autumnal glory of the people we have become, souls of experience and wisdom and compassion, souls of loyalty and eagerness and wonder.

Our campfire, September 20, 2013

October is a good month. It’s one of the best, isn’t it? It’s the only possible month that could comfort us as Summer departs. God knew what He was doing.

Another look at the jack-o’-lantern. After the BookFest, this jack served at a bonfire in our backyard. We had friends over, and a few days later, their very young daughter was reminiscing about the experience with her mom. “We had a fire at Fred and Julie’s,” the wee one said. “There was a monkey there who made Fred and Julie sad.” Now, isn’t that eerie? My theory is that she was talking about this jack-o’-lantern. At least, I hope so. I hope there was no worse “monkey” that we adults couldn’t see . . .

The Book Center . . . I remember first seeing The Lord of the Rings there — the Ballantine paperbacks with the covers drawn and painted by Tolkien himself. They were not used books, but not particularly new; although LOTR sold well perennially, and we reordered it regularly, I don’t think they’d been printed recently. They had an aging-book smell to them which I can’t describe, but which I’m sure I’d always recognize with a cry of delight if the scent were waved beneath my nose. No other books smelled quite like them, and it was that edition I read first. I associate that scent and that experience with autumn — or at least with colder months — and somehow with a long car trip. I think I may be remembering how the light looks in the cover images of The Two Towers and The Return of the King (and I’ve always thought that Barad-dur on that cover looks very much like Memorial Elementary School, where I attended kindergarten — you know, that drawing Tolkien did of Memorial School, with Mt. Doom far-off in the background). I must have read the books at least partly during an autumn, holed up in warmth, on car trips, in the back room of the store, at home. Remember, I was coming off post-Watership Down depression, when I’d thought I’d never find another book in the world that could measure up. So I was discovering this magnificent odyssey, this multi-layered world Tolkien had sub-created, the Misty Mountains and the Dwarves and the Mines of Moria . . . things ancient and strange and sad and wondrous . . .

[Aside: Just tonight we were watching an episode of Downton Abbey, and Lord Grantham said to Bates, “Will you walk with me through the vale of shadow?” Julie and I just looked at each other with wondering smiles. Only moments before, I had commented on how, when WWI starts, the music on the show begins sounding a lot more like the soundtrack of LOTR, all deep and powerful and sad. I guess all great stories eventually start sounding like LOTR.]

But backing up . . . before I read LOTR, as the covers of those books were beginning to intrigue me, I remember asking my dad what these books were about. “Oh,” he said (not having read them himself), “It’s a great story. Tolkien was German, a professor. It’s a grand saga about a ring, and full of monsters and adventures. Everyone wants the ring.”

Wow, I thought. That was recommendation enough for me. A short while later in life, I realized Dad had had this ring confused with Wagner’s. Or Siegfried’s. Or whatever. But he was close enough. Tolkien may have been English, not German, but his story was still the stuff of operas, still rife with dragons and forgotten stairs and all those enchanted elements. And yes, everyone wanted the ring.

Camping at Ohiopyle, September 20, 2013. See, we got this wonderful tent, plus camping chairs, sleeping bags, and a cooler as wedding presents. Plus a very cool camping lantern and ice packs and anti-mosquito bracelets! We had to use it all before cold weather set in . . .

But it wasn’t the book-covers and Dad’s description alone that drew me to LOTR. There was also a fascinating poster on display in the store’s front window. It was extremely stylized — not a realistic rendition at all, but a spiky, spidery, flame-riddled abstraction in red, purple, and black of jagged mountains and Black Riders and webs and . . . actually, I don’t remember much more of the content than that. Trees, maybe. But it was a promotional poster for LOTR. For this kid, it worked.

Camping at Ohiopyle

My dad at his post was the real heart of The Book Center. Dad was soft-spoken and didn’t like crowds, but one-on-one, he was the most genial and hospitable soul I’ve known. In addition to his high stool behind the counter, there was a second chair — placed there, I suppose, with the intention that my mom or some other assistant might occupy it. But it was nearly always filled by some customer. As with small-town barbershops, there were many Taylorvillians who came in regularly just to shoot the breeze with Dad. He would gladly listen and talk about most anything: local history, politics, books, the weather, the meaning of life . . . if you came in to discuss the paranormal, you were guaranteed a seat for as long as you wanted it.

Carrying water

I recall a particular adventure I had in “helping to man the cash register” at an early age. I wanted to help. Dad agreed to let me. So a customer brought up some books to buy. I carefully punched the prices in on the old-fashioned register — big round metal keys, forced down by brute strength, and then a handle cranked round and round till the cash drawer opened with a diinnggg! The total of the books came to, we’ll say, $3.79. (Yes, in those days, you could buy three or four books for that price, if you chose well.) I very carefully bagged the books, counted out $3.79 from the drawer with my finest math skills, and handed the cash and the books to the delighted customer. Yes, siree, it was no wonder we were the most popular bookstore in town!

Another time I was helpful was during the Christmas season one year. It was a glorious time — Mom would string plastic holly all the way around the store, atop the book racks, along the walls — holly circumnavigating everything. We launched a campaign called, “It Isn’t Christmas Without a Book.” True enough, isn’t it? Even today, though I’m given the riches of Solomon for Christmas, if I don’t receive at least one book under the tree, I’ll go off and sniff and console myself with the knowledge that at least the Lord of Heaven was born in Bethlehem to bring me eternal life, to die in my place for my sins, to enable me to do all things, to give me abundant life and joy and blessings. At least I’ve got that! Then someone will remember the oversight, give me a book, and I will truly have it all.

So we had a big, flashing electric sign that proclaimed, “IT ISN’T CHRISTMAS WITHOUT A BOOK!” And I thought, Hey! — Why not put me, an all-American boy, in the store window, reading a book? I loved being in those windows. They weren’t just windows — they were stages of polished wood — almost like entire rooms to the right and left of the entranceway. You climbed up into them, off the main floor of the store, and you could set up all sorts of things. The Tolkien poster was on the back wall of one such. Here was a chance for me to sit . . . and read . . . and read . . . and be helping, all at the same time! My parents agreed, and so there I sat. I don’t remember now what book I was reading, but I read a lot of it.

I recall some customers commenting on how cute that was: women, I believe, standing outside the glass in the brisk December air, bundled in their coats, browsing the jolly books my parents had on display, standing on end, all around me. How cute, the realistic mannequin of the little boy reading a book!

Except I wasn’t a mannequin. I looked up at them. I probably grinned; that’s what I do. They shrieked and jumped. They laughed and chattered, proclaiming their fright to each other, as theater audiences in Jaws used to do after the jump-and-scream scenes, glad to be alive and scared. A little bit of Hallowe’en in Christmas. It isn’t Christmas, you know, without a book.

The Ukrainian shashlikh Julie cooked for us (fantastic!) — chicken and vegetables

I remember a rat. Our store was in an old building in the downtown of our community. Dad bought a super-sized candy bar from some kids’ organization that was selling them to raise funds. The thing probably weighed a full pound. He left it, still unopened, under the counter one night at closing. The next day, he couldn’t find it. Eventually I discovered it. It lay with the wrapper shredded, halfway down the basement stairs. The chocolate bore distinct incisor-marks. I learned then that rats are strong and determined, and they will take what doesn’t belong to them.

We had a great time at this fire. My wife read aloud to me some chapters from a book about people and life.

One of the very best things about the main part of the bookstore was that the racks had hollow insides. I could wriggle in there and creep along through the closeness, through the dim light from pegboard holes. I could go pretty much the length of the store from front to back. I could read in places where light fell through the cracks. That was my secret world, the world of story . . . the world of imagination.

There was one time, though, when my toes were sticking out beneath the edge of a rack. Maybe I put them there deliberately, my bare, dust-black toes. Maybe my six-year-old self knew that there were some teenage girls browsing along through the magazines. Maybe I knew they needed a good scream, because it was October, like it is now. And dark October is the time to be alive; it’s the gateway to Christmas. And it isn’t Christmas without a book.