The visit to see my dentist today cost me only seventy-five bucks, because he didn't even need to take new x-rays. He ran a test on my face with tickling it with tissue paper to see if I had an infected trifurcated facial nerve. I didn't. Another of his patients has it, and it's a bad thing that is painful and requires surgery. Tonight I count my blessings. I have so, so many blessings. The Lord has been merciful to me beyond my comprehension. I truly feel like one of the children of the Most High, a prodigal son who gets welcomed home over and over. The people I have gotten to meet, and with whom I have shared fellowship and love!
Driving away from the dental office down Campbell Ave I headed for the visitation chapel at the nearby Catholic Church were I said a decade of the Rosary without beads and then went on my way. The tiny chapel was full of at least eight people, and two more came in, a Hispanic couple hand in hand, as I was leaving. They had probably all come from Confession, I concluded, having been instructed by the priest to spend time there as penance and spiritual preparation to receive the Eucharist.
How my grandmother would have loved to see that! If I had gone to Florida in the fall of 2004, she would probably pressured me to become Catholic, as she did in 1989 when I stayed there a month before starting graduate school in Austin, when my grandfather was still alive. She took her practice of her Catholic faith very seriously. It must have terribly tore her up for her own daughter to abandon Catholicism and become a Protestant, and to her grandchildren outside the Catholic Church.
Having given thanks to God for my relative good fortune at the dentists, I decided to treat myself on the way home to something I hadn't done in a while, maybe over a year, which is to pay a visit to my favorite used book store in Phoenix. i had been dropping by there after dentists visit back when I used to go to a big fancy practice on Camelback, and where, to ease the stress of the many procedures I did then to save my teeth, I would get off the Bell Road exit (same street as the one I walk down to but much further to the west) and find Dog Eared Pages used books in the the little L-shaped strip mall on 32nd St just south of Bell.
When you go inside you see the owner---Pete, I think his name is---sitting at the counter. A passageway into the back, itself lined with books, leads to a large backroom that Pete will tell you used to be a ballet studio before it became a used book store. The wooden floor is the giveaway, and it helps make it a joy to walk around the room amidst the tall shelves. I've been in there half a dozen times over the last four years, but Pete does not remember me, as he has many regulars.
He will tell you that business is ok, but he is not making money. This is hobby in his retirement, and when he retires from this, it will most likely go out of business. He will tell you is the last of the once 28 independent used book stores in the Phoenix metro area. The retirees here gave them a lot of business. Business had grown steadily for everyone until around 2011 when digital readers, like Nook and Kindle, came on the scene. Since then it has become unprofitable to run a used bookstore of physical books and it they became to close like a massacre.
Hearing this I almost got physically ill. Used book stores are to me among the best things in the world, even just for browsing. When we find one in a small town while driving, I invariably want to stop and take a look inside, just to experience it. For used book stores like this to disappear would be the worst thing since we stopped writing letters. It felt like another sign of the end of civilization altogether.
As a result, I try to patronize Dog Eared Pages whenever I can, and since I have to pass along that section of freeway when going to the dentist, but my old one and my current one, it makes for a good diversion after I can relax like today.
Pete was busy was a customer as I walked in. I lingered a minute and then decided to head to the backroom straightway. In this case I was, for the first time, looking for a children's book, so I headed to that small section, which in a nook in the corner of the room where the floor is set lower than the main room, and probably used for some special purpose when it was a ballet studio.
The way children's books are today, it is not easy to read the spines, as they are often too think. I know this from the free library in the park. So I went back in the front room and now Pete was free, so I asked him about the book. It turns out he can look up his inventory---the entire history of his collection---from his computer (just like what I'm trying to do with my own books).
I told him I had seen it for sale online, but it was not in any of the local libraries. I had checked in the online databases for both the city and county systems and was shocked to see it missing, because the author, a woman, was rather well known, and the illustrator even more so.
It just shows my naivté about this. Evidently old children's books are not in vogue. Things made sense to me. Pete looked up the title and said, "Nope, I've never had it in my store ever." Then he noticed the date. Oh, it was published in 2001. That's old."
I tried to tell him that in fact the book was not published in 2001 but in 1960, and that the date he was seeing was a later reissue. He countered with "yes it was reiussed in 2008."
It now made sense to me why it was not in the library system of a county of 4.6 million people. Nobody wants the old stuff, apparently, which is pretty much the opposite of what I like. I hate the newer kids books. It makes me really treasure the old ones.
I could purchase the book online used for about fifteen bucks, but I'm going to keep looking for the book as part of along-term scavenger hunt I have assigned myself arbitrary. It will come into my life when the time is right, even if it takes a while.
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