The Path of the Bookseller

I was surprised that the customer did not have ashes on her forehead. Today was Ash Wednesday, and most of the other customers who came in wearing crosses like hers also wore the ashes, but she did not.

“Can I help you find anything?” I asked.

“I was hoping that you might have some tissue paper for my flower,” she said, and looked down. I followed her gaze and saw that she was holding a small white flower, possibly a rose. The petals were perfect, though some of the leaves were scuffed and faded. A white bag tie held the larger leaves closer to the main stem.

“We have some sheets of tissue paper here on the gift-wrapping display,” I said, gesturing toward the spinner of gift supplies to my left.

“No, that would be too much,” she said. “May I tell you, and this may be too much information.” She paused, reached up with her free hand, and brushed at her forehead, as if to brush away a lock of her short white hair.

“Some time ago, not long ago,” she said, “I was in a car accident. It was a difficult recovery. I had brain surgery.

“I came home. Later, on a very snowy day, I had an urge to visit a florist. Just that, to visit a florist.

“So I went and visited a florist. It was snowing heavily, and it was a Monday. I went out in the snow. When I got there, she was carrying flowers, a lot of flowers, to the dumpster. ‘Those flowers are beautiful!’ I said. ‘Why are you throwing them out?’

“She said ‘I have to. After so many days, I have to throw out the old flowers.’

“‘May I buy them from you?’ I said. I didn’t have much money.

“‘No, you can’t.’ But she said I could take the flowers from the dumpster later.’

“I thanked her and she went inside. Then I reached into the dumpster and took the flowers out. And then — it was still a snowy day — I went to the homes of my friends who had helped me. I went to their houses, and I put a flower at each of the houses, without telling them, just put the flowers where they would be beautiful.

“And I’ve been doing that for a few months now, just going to the florist, getting the flowers from the dumpster, and putting them in front of my friends’ houses. I’ve been putting them at businesses, too, at Legacy Village, out Cedar Road, out Richmond Road. I hadn’t put any at your mall yet, though. Yes. I will have to start to put them at your mall.”

She paused, raised her free hand and brushed at the shoulder of her impeccable cream-colored coat. “I used to be, well, it doesn’t matter who I used to be,” she said, lowering her hand to rest on the wrist of the hand that held the flower.

She closed her eyes for a second, then opened them and looked up at me. “When I came back from the brain surgery, they told me that I wouldn’t be the person that I used to be. I might remember that person, and I might try to be that person, and I might miss that person, but I would be a different person.

“They told me I would have to make a lot of new choices. Things I used to do automatically, from choices I made long ago, I would have forgotten those choices, or they might be the wrong choices now. They might be the choices the person that I used to be had made. I have to make new choices now. And I love that I get to make new choices. I’m getting to choose a new person to be.”

She smiled broadly and place her hands together as if in prayer, with the flower clasped between them. “I’m getting to choose who I get to be. And now, now I choose to be the Flower Lady.”

I’m terrible with faces. I can meet someone several times and, other than a vague sense of having met the person before, retain little information as to who the person is.

Oddly, I’m very good with email addresses. I can be talking to a customer at the register and not know who he or she is. But then I’ll ask for the customer’s email address, or see the address when I scan the Rewards card, and all the information will come flooding back into my mind.

I also find that I can remember people better if I have described them to someone else, or written a few words of a description down in the notebook in which I capture ideas for blogging. My memory may be tuned to handle text strings better than images. I know that I’m much better at remembering sounds than things I’ve seen.

On Sunday, I ran into someone else who apparently had an equally bad memory for faces.

A woman and a girl came up to me at the information desk. The woman did not look familiar, but the girl triggered a verbal memory of “ten-year-old girl with short red hair, ornate black-framed 50s-era glasses, and a never-ending grin.”

“Maybe you can help me,” the woman said. “I was hoping to find the man who helped me a few weeks ago. We were looking for some fantasy or Sci-Fi books for my granddaughter and grandson, and this wonderful, kind salesman spent a lot of time with us and gave us a list of possibilities. I think his name was Joe.”

At this point, the girl’s grin exploded into loud chains of giggles. The woman turned sharply toward her. “What is so funny?” the woman demanded.

The girl tried to say, “He’s… his…” but kept lapsing into the giggles. She reached out and, while tugging at her grandmother’s sleeve with one hand, poked my name badge repeatedly with the other.

The woman sputtered, “He’s… you… what are… Oh!” and broke into laughter herself. “So you were the person who helped us?”

“I think I may have been,” I said, and took the list that she held out. “Yup, that’s my handwriting, so I guess I was. Can I help you find these?”

I led them to the various sections and went through the list, giving further comments and descriptions and making further recommendations. The girl had read some of them already, and decided against others. They ended up getting Ursula K. Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea and Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies.

I’m pretty sure they’ll be back. I hope they come together, since by the time that I thought to write down the grandmother’s description, I couldn’t remember any details of what she looked like. (”A white woman of average build, somewhat shorter than me, with grey hair” describes a large subset of our customer base.)

But if the girl is still wearing the glasses, the grin, or both, or if they still have the list with my handwriting, I may be able to figure things out.

Tonight, the store was about as quiet as I’ve ever seen it. The occasional customer drifted through, but for the most part, little was happening. February is usually quiet, and weather forecasts warned that we were to get slammed with snow starting in mid-evening. The snow didn’t happened while we were open, but the threat was enough to keep people at home.

I was pleased to be able to spend four hours straight, with few interruptions, on a large project. By corporate fiat, we are reorganizing our CD holdings. We had had a large set of categories, but we’re now knocking it down to five. We’re setting aside Classical (still subdivided as it was), Shows/Soundtracks, Compilations, and Value (everything priced $7.99 or under). The rest is getting bulked together into Popular.

My initial reaction to hearing about this was shock and dismay. On further thought, though, I decided that it makes sense.

We no longer have anywhere nearly as many CDs as we once had. When I started here at my second store, we had almost as many classical CDs as we have total CDs now (and that was after one of the first massive cutbacks in CDs). We also don’t have dedicated music sellers as we once had. We still have people with a dedication to selling music, but all of us work in all sections of the store. We don’t have as many workers stationed in the music section to help people find CDs as we once did.

Genres can be a problem. Take, for example, Norah Jones’s CDs. We’ve had people look for her in jazz, pop, country, world music, folk, and even classical. I’ve seen people head away from the CD section empty-handed, thinking that we didn’t stock her at all because she wasn’t in the section in which they expected to find her. The same is true of Frank Zappa: I’ve seen people look for his CDs in rock, jazz, classical, and comedy.

We do get some customers looking for specific genres, though often they categorize things differently than we do. (A customer asked me yesterday where our Neo-Soul section was.) I recognize that we’re going to have customers disgruntled that we no longer have a distinct Jazz section, but that’s about the only large case that I think should have been kept separate.

Most customers come in looking for specific artists or authors or books. This gets disguised, though, by customers asking indirect questions. People seem to think that they will lose some sort of power points if they let a worker know just what they are looking for. In the case yesterday, the customer looking for Neo-Soul actually wanted a specific CD by a specific artist. When customers buy into this cultural phobia of letting others know what they need, it takes careful listening and questioning to be able to lead them to what they actually want.

On a workers’ message board tonight , when I said that I liked the redesign, an anonymous poster asked me:

Ok, youve written a book….now wouldn’t you want that book to be placed in the genre category of which you feel it belongs?? That way people who read that genre may just happen upon your book even though they are unfamiliar with you as an author.

I responded:

Consider if the store had as few books as we have of CDs, and if the store contained (depending on which of my books you mean) just music books or just local interest or just fiction. That would more closely approximate the situation with CDs, and explain to you why the relay makes sense.

Even with my books: The Book of Voices could be filed in Judaica, Fantasy, or Literature/Fiction. 19th Nervous Breakdown (coming in June) could be in Humor, Memoir, or Sales/Marketing. The Rounds could be in Local Interest or in Memoir. Shekhinah: the Presence could be in Judaica, Poetry, or Theater. Surprise Me with Beauty: the Music of Human Systems is the only one with a single clear placement, though, come to think of it, it might be in any one of several of our Music subsections.

The idea of having very few sections has worked well in the past. One of my favorite music stores in the country, Waterloo Records in Austin, organizes its CDs in one large category, with only a few genres, such as classical music, separated out. And the idea didn’t come out of laziness. The store’s website says that how they do business:

[...] came more out of understanding the customer’s viewpoint than planning a marketing strategy. It rose from the kindred soul of merchant and customer. Instead of catering to the music consumer, Waterloo catered to the music lover, if only because we were music lovers too.

The page notes that the people in Austin, who have been known to be very focused on how they want their music, have chosen Waterloo as Austin’s best record store every year since it opened in 1982. So they must be keeping the customers satisfied.

Doing the reorganization is a lot of work. It’s made more challenging by other aspects of what we have to do. I’m working on it during hours that the store is open, so I’m having to help customers find CDs while the categories are in the process of changing. We also have to spread the work over about a week, which means that I have to leave the CDs in at least a somewhat intelligible state between work days. And we don’t have good places to lay discs out, sort them, and merge them, which means that I’m doing things in place in the bins, shifting CDs in stages.

So it was a kind of blessing that the store was so quiet tonight. I can’t plan on that kind of uninterrupted time being available when I get back to work on Sunday, so I’ve had to take the time to sketch a plan for how to continue the work without disrupting the shoppers too much.

I think it’s going to work. There will be some adjustment needed, and some people will have the usual problems adapting to new situations. But I do think that it’s going to work.

The weather gods gave us three glorious days without snow: three days on which I didn’t have to wear boots to work; three days on which our vistas turned from stark white and grey to a refreshing blur of green and brown.

That ended last night, as the snow resumed control of the landscape. As we looked out of the cafe windows, we saw it move from a few falling flakes to a steady all-consuming blur, as if the street scene outside was hidden by undulating sheets of hospital gauze.

The shipments of pastries and related goods didn’t make it to the café today. When I went over at lunch to get my coffee (no longer free for employees, but a pretty reasonable 27 cents with the rewards card), several of the regulars were hanging out by the counter. The refrigerated case held an artful array of the remaining munchies. Red and white trays each held one or two items, exhibited against the otherwise blank surface.

“No cookies?” one said. “You had them yesterday. I was really looking forward to a snickerdoodle.”

“They must have expired,” another said.

“Expired?”

“Yup,” I said. “They can only keep things for a few days. Once that time’s expired, they have to toss their cookies.”

“Sounds like the fund raiser I was at last night,” the tutor said. He was there as always, in a break between helping prepare kids for the dreaded SAT, ACT, and other educational acronyms of terror. “There was lots of beer, and some people brought their own liquor.”

“What kind of fundraiser was that?” someone asked.

“School system,” the tutor replied.

“Huh,” said another. “That explains a lot about our school system.”

I had had to do some rescue work in the men’s café restroom in the morning. A customer complained that the stall had been locked from the inside.

I figured that I would have to reach over the door and down to knock the latch open. My arm wasn’t long enough. I got a broomstick from the back room, but I couldn’t quite connect with the latch. I dug around some more and got several longer and skinnier items, but couldn’t make them work either.

There was only one option left. I looked under the stall door to make sure that there was nothing awful on the floor, then lay on my back and slid in. I was pleased to discover that I was still thin enough to fit, though I had to maneuver a bit to keep my belt buckle from snagging on the door’s underside.

Once in, I was able to reach up and flip the latch open. Looking at the mechanism, I could see why reaching down didn’t work. It was designed so that the bolt, once engaged with both the door and the frame, turned down to hold the door securely shut. It needed to be flipped upward, which couldn’t be done from above.

While the store and café were busy early in the day, the pace slowed as the snow built up. By evening, things were quite quiet, and we were able to get work down on some of the reshuffling of sections we were doing within the store.

By the time that I left, a couple of inches of snow had collected on the ground. It wasn’t the worst kind of messy snow, nor was it particularly deep, but it was treacherous. Due to the shifting temperatures and other conditions as it fell, the smooth snow in many places disguised patches of lumpy ice beneath it. Not the best of walking weather, but not all that bad. The weather is the weather. I’m not sure if I’m happy or dismayed to realize that I’m finally getting used to it.

The customer seemed almost too eager to buy things. She had only been vaguely aware of eReaders before, but when I gave her a very brief demo of ours, she bought it. Offered the company’s Rewards Plus cards, she bought it. I mentioned several books that she might like, and she bought all of them, too.

“Do you know how to connect and set-up the eReader?” I asked.

“Well,” she said, “my husband is — my husband was good at it. He can — well, he could have helped me. We’ll — I’ll figure it out.”

She rummaged around in her purse. “Now where did I put that new checkbook?” She pulled random items out and scattered them on the counter. I could see that her hands (thin, pale, wrinkled, with dark veins tracing a path between the age spots) were subtly shaking.

She pulled the checkbook out, and I handed her a pen. Before I hit the “Total” key, I remembered to ask her one more question. “Will you need gift receipts?”

“Oh, no,” she replied. “This is all for me.”

She paused, closed then opened her eyes, and looked up at me. “It’s not like me to spend money like this. Always, I’ve gotten things for everyone else: family, friends, charities, the church. I’m always — I’ve always been frugal, always lived within my means. But this, this is…”

She paused again and gestured at the items that she was buying, then at her checkbook. “I’ve just put fifty thousand dollars in this bank account. This was my husband’s… my husband… passed away not long ago. This is his insurance. I know that I have to be careful with this. I intend to live a long, long time — well, I’ve already lived a long time, but I intend to live even longer, and this money will have to last. But for now, this… this is for me. Just this once, this is for me. Now how much is this?”

I told her the total, which was somewhere between two and three hundred dollars.

“And, um, which store is this again?”

I reminded her. She filled out the check and handed it to me with an ID. I ran the check through the register. It worked immediately. I popped it into the register and tore the long receipt from the printer. “Would you like one or more bags? I mean, since we no longer have the complimentary forklifts.”

She laughed. “Yes, thank you. Bags will be fine.”

I loaded the items into three of our large shopping bags. “Do you need help getting these out to your car?”

“No, I can handle them myself. But thanks.”

She took the bags, putting one on each wrist and one in one hand, grasping her cane with the other.

“Have fun,” I said.

“Yes, I will,” she said. “Yes. I intend to have fun.”