There’s a little free library in my grandkids’ neighborhood. It’s one of those birdhouse things built on a pedestal in a family’s front yard. This one was built by a man out of the goodness of his heart. I know this because one day as I pushed the double stroller with the twins, the man’s father warmed his car in the driveway. While his car’s exhaust choked the girls and me (a pet peeve of mine but how could I insist he turn it off when I was in his son’s yard–his son who was so generous with free books?), he told me how his son just out of the goodness of his heart built this little free library and all the neighbors, seeing an opportunity to clean out their houses, were constantly dropping off books for him to include in the library.
“Does he need more books?” I asked. I’m always up for cleaning more out of my house.
“Oh, no” and then an emphatic “no!” He had enough books for now, he frowned about the opportunistic neighbors. I imagined towers of boxes of books in this poor man’s garage, just waiting to slide into the tiny birdhouse of books.
I figured I was doing my civic duty to swing by on our walks and check for new offerings to fill not just my house but also my son’s house. The girls sat in their harnesses and kicked their feet, chanting “Books! Books! Books!”
From this birdhouse library, I’ve gotten my grandson a “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” graphic book, the girls a Santa board book with a Santa nose that no longer lights up (I scrubbed it with 409), a David Sedaris book I devoured in one weekend, classics and more. I left the chick lit for another passerby.
Inside the Sedaris book, I found a neatly folded receipt from three years ago. I learned this book was bought at the Tattered Cover Bookstore at Denver International Airport in July. Just the book. No water or gum or mixed nuts. I imagined the dutiful salesperson trying to upsell this customer and he or she held strong.
I imagined the book buyer (I see this as a man for some reason) with his tightly cropped hair and well groomed clothing (businessy but not a suit) standing in front of the woman from Ethiopia or Eritrea or another country at the checkout counter. He is not looking for conversation, just the book.
“Will that be all?” she asks to which he curtly responds yes and does not meet her eye. “Would you like a bag?” He says no. She’s unable to upsell anything or get him to buy anything more.
Just the book. For less than $20, this man looking for a laugh has an entertaining read for a plane ride to wherever. It was a roundtrip because how else could this book have been bought in Denver and ended up an hour north in this neighbor’s birdhouse library?
The type-A book buyer had folded the receipt neatly, four times like a map. First, he folded it down the portrait length of the receipt (not landscape as I would’ve done). The receipt is thin and I imagine the book owner as slender now. Then he folded the receipt lengthwise again and finally a landscape fold, creasing tightly as he went.
This crisply folded receipt is now his bookmark, left in this free book now three years later for me to find. I was struck by the neatness that went into this process unlike what I use for bookmarks. In fact, at this moment, I have bookmarked page 107 with a haphazardly folded paper towel that has a smudge on it from the kung pao chicken I had for lunch. I’ve been known to use boarding passes, tissues (clean), gum wrappers, old mail, ink pens but never a neat four-fold receipt. I haven’t the personality for it.
I remember when I worked in retail one summer while in college. At first I worked sweeping outdoor pavilions at this camp, then I was promoted to the store where I stocked shelves in the morning and ran a cash register along with four other people my age or younger in the afternoons. Hordes of kids with cash in hand stormed the store for Gobstoppers, Zots, Laffy Taffy, Tootsie Rolls. Of course, they loaded up on sugary pop to fight the Oklahoma summer heat.
Bored with the same old transactions, we decided to upsell them outlandish items. “Would you like a slab of bacon with that gum?” “Need a watermelon with your Cheetos?” “How about a box of Tide to go?” We laughed uproariously while young kids stared at us, slack jawed. When that got old, we decided to have dress up days: Hawaiian, hippie, cowboy. Anything to make us laugh and to connect with one another in the face of kids who saw us as nothing more than someone to transact with.
Maybe that’s why I try to change the conversation with cashiers in bookstores in airports. “How’s your day going?” “Have you been busy today?” “Where are you from?” They usually look at me with surprise and answer briefly. They’ve got a job to do and I’m sure I’m just one face in a million. Or maybe–just maybe–I cut the monotony of the same old, same old every day. I like to think that just like the man who took the time to build a free library in his front yard–to store boxes of neighbors’ castaway books, to add surprises of little packaged toys now and then–that maybe seeing people as more than just transactional sources brings a smile to their face. I like to think I’ve brightened their day but I’ve probably just irritated the person behind me in line.
My daughter-in-law is a teacher who started as a kindergarten teacher so she is all about books. She taught our grandson to read before he was four years old. He read like a four year old, but he read. My sister’s husband, Larry, was a school principal in Oklahoma and he said there’s no way he is reading so we made a video of him sounding out the words. Larry is a believer now.
My grandson has hundreds of books at his fingertips because his mother, the teacher, buys him books all the time. Every holiday, she trades out the books in his room so he has a fresh batch of books that we usually read to him and his sisters. He read at a four year old level, after all. When his twin sisters came, they had their own set of books in their room and they stood in their crib corners while we regaled them before nap and bedtime.
I don’t remember a lot of books in our house when I was growing up, but somehow I learned to love books. We had the Cat in the Hat, The Cat in the Hat Comes Back, and Green Eggs and Ham. We also had the obligatory set of encyclopedias that are a definite thing of the past. I particularly liked the diagrams of the human body with layers of plastic film that I could pull apart and then put back the body’s organs, nerves, skeleton, and skin. It was the closest thing we had to tech back then.
When I was in the second grade, I told my teacher Mrs. Olney that I had read all of The Wizard of Oz in a reading contest she had going. Imagine my chagrin when she made a BIG deal out of it and I was going to get some kind of second grader recognition at open house. I couldn’t take the pressure. I admitted to my mother that I had not actually read ALL of the book but had instead leaned a bit on the annual showing of The Wizard of Oz on television. Since my mother valued honesty above all things, she made me confess to Mrs. Olney that I was more like an evil winged monkey than the Scarecrow who just wanted a brain.
I don’t think there was a library in town when we lived in that mining town in Arizona, but I found a library in the county when we moved to a small town in Oklahoma. I spent all summer, curled up with a book while my brothers and sister played outside. Getting to the library was a challenge since I was dependent on my mom and dad to drive me there so I was excited when the Bookmobile came to our small town of 300.
The red Bookmobile would pull up in front of the post office. I was usually standing there alone to climb its buslike steps where a woman waited inside. We didn’t say much to one another. I didn’t ask for recommendations, but I checked out the maximum books possible and would have them read before she returned the next month.
Books have always been important to me and I consider myself a strong reader, but I have to admit that I am befuddled by and actually a little appalled by people who say they read 100 books every year. A hundred books! How!? I asked a friend who posted this accomplishment on Instagram how can you possibly read that many books? I mean she has four boys and seems to have an amazing marriage and life. You know, Instagram.
I have a book in my car, in my purse, by my bed, she said. She reads books at every downtime, while waiting anywhere, and even listens to books. I do the same and I am lucky to knock out 30 books each year. I think anyone who reads 100 books per year must not watch TV because I listen to books in the car and read books on my phone in wait times. I’m not sure I would give up my TV to get anymore books in if that’s what it takes.
I have stacks of books in our study, by my recliner (where I watch TV), on my bedside table. Right now, I have four books in my bag and I’m in the middle of two or three books on my Kindle. I love books!
I thought I would never get to a point where I didn’t just buy any book I wanted. Then I retired and books became a luxury. That’s why I’m so excited when I find a free library randomly on a walk with the girls. I’m getting creative at finding books at lower prices. Thrift stores are a great place to buy cheap books but some thrift stores are woefully disorganized so I have to go through every shelf to find some hidden gems.
There is this thrift store, though, on the way home from the grandkids’ house that has almost a Dewey Decimal system on its shelves. Organized by genre, I love searching for books on a budget. The first time I went there, a watchful man stood in one area, reading a book and making comments to himself. I didn’t think this too strange; I mean I was in a thrift store.
The next time I went to the store, the same watchful man stood in the SAME area, reading a book, but not making any comments. I scooched by him and said, “Excuse me. Can I look at that shelf?” and he was visibly perturbed.
When I told my 86-year-old mother about the man, she said, “Oh! Don’t go in there again! That’s weird!”
My mom was always super cautious and I usually didn’t give into her fears, but I was very cautious when I rounded the corner to the books the third time I stopped in. If he is here again, I thought, that is weird and I’m not coming back. He was back in the toy area because it turns out he works there.
While I do love getting good buys on books at the thrift store, I started realizing that it was an inefficient way to look for specific books. So enter the library. I will admit that in past book clubs when women would talk about getting their books at the library, I thought, “How cheap do you have to be to get your books at the library?”
Renting books seemed like the behavior of someone who is not a connoisseur or at the least a curator of great books. I wanted to handle and own and shelve the great books we read.
Retirement has changed that. Retirement has changed a lot of things when it comes to my previous hobby: shopping. I just can’t bring myself to shop in regular stores for the endorphin rush anymore. My new rush is finding something I love for under $4 like an Eileen Fisher sweater that I found at Goodwill that I love having even though it makes me itch. I mean, it’s Eileen Fisher! Or the perfect turtleneck tunic that covers my neck and flares at my hips–two areas I’m working to hide.
As they say: Necessity is the mother of invention. Now the need to save money has invented in me a willingness to use my local library. And what a library it is! With fifteen branches in our county, all I have to do is go online, search for the book I want, and put a hold on it. And then the Pikes Peak Library District, wonder of wonders, will transport my book to the branch of my choosing which used to be next to our favorite grocery store and carwash. Now I can drive a little farther since they shut it down.
Recently, I picked up six books I had on hold, brought them home, skimmed all of them, read almost all of one of them, and loved another one so much that I decided I needed to own it so I could highlight, circle and write in the margin. Then I bought it on Amazon so I could devour it, study it, and reread it three times like I do my favorite books. Come to think of it, maybe that’s why I will never be someone who reads 100 books every year.