For the worker bee, life is given over to the grim satisfaction of striking a firm line through a task accomplished. On to the next, and the next. Check, check. Done and done. It explains---and solves---nothing to call this workaholism.
---Patricia Hampl, The Art of the Wasted Day
We kept driving by a used bookstore here in town and saying, "We really need to stop in." We like bookstores; it's nothing for us to get in the car on a weekend day and drive an hour to go to a Half Price Books shop, or to mooch around Barnes and Noble. Jim, especially, has his absolute favorite out of town booksellers.
But last Friday was a kind of rainy gray day, and my new mantra is Be HERE now, so I told Jim I was taking a ride to the bookstore in town. He was playing video games in his office; he weighed his options, and he finally asked, "Mind if I tag along?"
So that's what we did. We hadn't been in the bookstore since just after they opened—before, even, they had their grand opening event, and that was just pre-COVID. The shelves weren't too terribly full then. We didn't quite know what to expect. Jim, I suspect, was not too hopeful.
But the bookstore is the kind of place where books are neatly stacked and organized on shelves (FULL shelves, now, too, mind you). Sections are labelled—mystery, general fiction, romance, biography… The walls and shelves, in places, are new, raw wood, so the store has that just-tapped-potential, sawdust-y smell, mingled with the scent of books that many eyes have perused, and other hands have handled. (That book smell, to me, is very definite and completely indefinable.)
And then, in addition to the books on shelves, there are opened cartons placed, enticingly, here and there…and the nice lady at the desk said to please feel free to look through; they just hadn't had a chance to unpack.
It's a capacious place, so there's plenty of exploration room. There were two other people shopping, a young Amish couple, and they were totally book-focused, murmuring softly, giving little gasps of excited recognition now and then when they happened on a particular book.
And so in we plunged, into a dangerously alluring place,--a place filled with potential treasure.
And I found wonderful things—fat beach read books, an omnibus of George MacDonald's novels, a book of essays by a writer that I often love…but sometimes don't. Those essays were about the books that changed that writer's life. (I can't resist a book like that; I think each of us should write a memoir called, My Life in Books.) I grabbed a large-print book by Fannie Flagg, too, thinking I'd read it, then send it on to my favorite romance reader.
And there were tempters, there, too; I had to be stern with myself. Do you really NEED that? Cautionary Self would question, severely, and several times, Oh, FINE, Impulsive Self would respond, a little rudely, and reluctantly put a book back.
So that was a 45-minute odyssey, and I surfaced thinking, Oh, gosh; I hope Jim's not bored. I found him in the sci-fi fantasy section, three huge omnibus volumes cradled in his left arm. He was pulling another off the shelf with his right hand, and when he turned to look at me, there were candles in his eyes.
"They have a GREAT selection here," he said. "I just need a few more minutes."
So I found a padded, straight-backed but comfortable, chair and started reading the writer's essays about the books that buoyed him along. I think we were about two hours, total, in that bookstore, before we rung up our cache, thanked the bookstore lady, and left.
We took our haul home, and Jim immediately disappeared into the basement to rearrange his fantasy bookshelves again, to welcome the newcomers and fit them in. And I got dinner organized, on that gray afternoon, and then took the essays to the reading chair and read until Mark came in the back door.
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Yesterday, I found a voice mail telling me that the book I'd requested at the library was in; I picked James up at work, and he thought a library trip sounded interesting, and so we went there. And I came home with three more books—fascinating books, recommended, requested books, and I put them with the bookshop haul, and I had that comfortable feeling of shelves stocked, riches in store, for some time to come.
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And this morning, I woke up (much too early, at 5 a.m., to be precise, because I had neglected to turn sleep schedule off when I quelled yesterday's alarm—but, I'm sorry: that's neither here nor there), and I mooched down into a foggy morning, made the coffee, checked the calendar, and realized: there's nothing, really, scheduled for this day.
So I chatted with Mark over my coffee and his tea, and James got up and showered, popping downstairs perky and raring to go. Mark went off to work and to meet an old friend for a noon time meal.
The fog burned off, and James and I went to the college campus and walked off in different directions, circling the two colleges, meeting, finally, back at the car, refreshed and energized.
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And I come home to mix up some cookie dough, from a recipe in a cookbook borrowed from the library where James works. It's a gluten-free baking book, and the author recommends his chocolate chip cookies as the recipe to start with, so that's what I will do. I strap the book onto the wooden book rest James gave me for Mother's Day; it rests, wide open and impervious to all the messes baking brings on my kitchen counter.
I have ordered the exotic flours the author calls on me to use—sorghum flour and potato starch, oat flour and xanthan gum and almond meal. This cool and beautiful morning is a time to try something new, so I whisk together dry ingredients in a big metal bowl, stir melted butter and sugar in the stand mixer, add in the eggs and vanilla and finally the powdery stuff; when that's almalgamated, I pour in an array of chocolate—semisweet and milk chocolate chips, and a handful of plain M&M's.
And then, the recipe tells me, put the dough into the refrigerator. This is essential, I read, for the liquids to be absorbed by the grains; if I don't do it, I'll have a flattened cookie mess.
I cover the bowl obediently, move some scattered cold food, stow it in the fridge.
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Something wonderful happened in the past couple of weeks: after having given up on the quest, I found a gluten-free pasta that has the exact taste and texture I've been craving. I bought a kind of sampler, and, impressed by the thin spaghetti noodles and the penne pasta, I ordered some elbows, as well.
So today, in the empty space where I thought I'd be spooning cookie dough onto trays, sliding trays into the oven, slipping baked cookies onto the old pizza pan, and reading in between, I boil some water and cook up some elbows. I am excited: I am making pasta salad with tuna today, one of my all-time favorite summer treats…and one I thought, when I couldn't find a tasty gluten-free noodle, I'd have to give up for good.
I put some eggs on to hard boil, too, and while I do that, a FedEx truck pulls up to the carport, and the very nice driver starts sliding huge boxes out.
I run out to help; some boxes are REALLY heavy, the driver tells me. The others are light. Between the two of us, we neatly stack the equipment Mark will need this weekend to build us an enclosed, raised bed for our tomatoes. The chicken wire that rises five feet above the base of the raised beds will deter the deer.
Deer-proof raised beds! Excited, I run in to share the news with the Cordell tomato seedlings sunning on the windowsill in the family room: soon, kids, you'll be big enough to play outside!
I think I have two dozen plants this year, and some Roma tomato seeds just starting; I imagine burgeoning plants and wonderful red sauces, and tomatoes stewed and frozen and ready to help me make sauce on frigid winter days…
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And, as soon as the sealer people arrive and get to work on the driveway, James and I plan to have lunch at a little bistro in town, one he's never been too, but that promises a wonderful burger he can build himself. And then I'll come home and bake those cookies, mix up the salads, and settle into the reading chair. My biggest issue today will be this: What should I read first?
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The world hasn't changed; desperate problems have not disappeared; no tragedies have been undone. But I am both centered and grounded by this take-it-as-it-comes day. I realize this: sometimes I need a block of time with no external obligations. I need a day that I can steer---not, necessarily a sit-on-my-butt kind of day; just a day when I make my own decisions. A day with books vibrating on the shelf and cookie dough ready to be baked and the promise of sun-drenched tomatoes untrammeled by our deer friends.
Every once in a while—maybe MORE than once in a while---I need an unscheduled day.
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