Joseph Zitt

Maybe it was the odd chill in the still-dry air; maybe it was that most of the crazed Europeans had run out of August days to spend here (though one family did get into a furious argument in Italian at my register as each tried to pay — one with a credit card, one with crumpled dollar bills, and one by dumping a small bag of change on the counter and trying to figure out the values of each coin in the mound — for one book; I stood, arms by my side, and waited, until the older man waved the charge card in the air in an odd gesture, inscrutable and possibly obscene, and got the other two to back down); maybe it was that the back-to-school materials were gone, and we were already getting memos about how earlier memos about the holiday schedule were wrong; but it was, quite ominously, beginning to feel a lot like Christmas.
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