[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

I was in a used bookstore downtown, earlier today. It’s a ramshackle place with books and old magazines stacked on warped piles of records and rolled up blueprints and “Mardi Gras 1977” posters leaning against assumed tables; probably enough kitschy crap to deck out a whole reinvigorated warehouse district worth of lesbian coffee houses.  The poetry section shines. Either the owner’s tastes or the resale temperament does a commendable job filtering out new age gibberish and incongruent anthologies plus he shelves criticism with the criticized. I picked up a book of T.S. Eliot essays on Elizabethan drama. Last time I found a collection of poets’ views on Yeats. Five bucks, both.

While I was perusing the poetry a young woman, attractively in her mid-twenties or so, came in and struck up a conversation with the owner. She was in town for business, she said, doing a three-day project that only took two. She didn’t know anybody in town. Could he suggest anything? Sights? A place for lunch?

The only other person in the shop was a young guy, roughly her age, perusing local history and thumbing through old magazines. I knew he heard. The place was too small not to have. I’m old and happily married. The owner, older still. I don’t know local history guy’s story. I don’t know any of attractive work tourist’s story beyond what I’ve shared either, but what I had always considered a laughable cliché – a used bookstore hook up – was not unfolding before me despite the stage being improbably set. Local history didn’t so much as look over his shoulder.