Saturday's Child

I am writing this because I don’t want to forget that I once was young and full of dreams. In the early 1970’s, while I was busy ‘putting my husband through college’ working in a law office, we would occasionally visit a town 50 miles away. It was double the size of our college town and though it would always be another farm town, it had its very own small bookshop. Sure, you could pick up books at K-Mart or the university bookstore or even at the adult bookstore, but nothing like this little shop was to be had where we lived.

Not only did this shop sell hardbound books in its long narrow room but also sprinkled between the shelves were little areas devoted to hand-thrown pottery from local kilns. Large old storefront windows allowed the maximum amount of that precious north light to bath the store. And best of all, chairs were available to sit and read. Of course I did buy one book in spite of our lean financial status, Frances Moore Lappé’s Diet for a Small Planet that became the bible of the organic food movement.

After my very first visit to this bookstore—its name escapes me—I promised myself that this is what I’d like to do with the rest of my life when it was my turn to have that life was have my own little bookstore. I would name it Saturday’s Child because weekends were so precious to me. I would furnish it with large lights hanging from the ceiling like I’d seen in the railroad depot, local pots—maybe even some of my own, imagine that! —and best of all I would find the largest, plushest leather armchairs with reading lamps to set near the door. That would be how visitors to my Saturday’s Child would be welcomed.

My plan for my own shop kept being pushed behind in line by life: dear children, detours of depression, the oddest jobs, school, libraries and more living. Little did I know back then that these brave little shops would be nudged out by big box bookstores. And as a gift for that young woman in Idaho who once had a plan, I periodically revisit my copy of the book 84 Charing Cross Road about a writer in New York and her lifetime relationship with a London antiquarian bookstore. The photo below is from Charing Cross Road in London.

I’ve kept my promise to always stop at bookstores on the main streets of any town I visit, in homage to big plans, the small bookseller and with a fond memory of my Saturday’s Child.

Study more plans at Sunday Scribblings.
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