Deeds & Words

[Second Chances Used Books will be open seven days a week; Monday-Saturday 10:30-6:00, Sunday, 10:30-5:00.]

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I did not buy the first book at Second Chances books.  Emma, Brandy’s friend and a former Copperfield’s employee, said on Friday that she was going to get over early on Saturday and buy the first book. She had it all picked out. I wasn’t going to arm-wrestle Emma for the privilege because I would lose that contest.

This was the view coming through the door Saturday morning.

In fact, Brandy had random customers walk in first thing, and they made the first purchase at 10:32. Emma, chagrined, made the second purchase.

I think Emma should become the store’s official photographic model.

I said mine was the third but I think I forgot that someone else bought a book after Emma, so my To the Lighthouse purchase was the fourth official sale.

To The Lighthouse, the fourth sale.

I’m slipping. I did bring cake, though.

(I parked behind Rite Aid and walked over to Safeway to pick it up. I planned to walk to the store, which I did. As I was halfway across the crosswalk on Main Street, a car making a left turn shot across in front of me. I remember thinking clearly, “If you kill me in the crosswalk before I deliver the cake, driver dude, I will haunt you for the rest of your life. And your children’s lives.”  I’m serious about cake.)

“Happy Soft Launch” does not have quite the same ring.

Many, many people came to the store on Saturday! Some were family, some were friends, some were folks who hadn’t known that Mockingbird had moved, but who stayed and shopped and bought books.

I had been baffled about the Mockingbird thing for weeks, but finally the logic of it had percolated through. Several people who came in said they were not local, but they came up a few times a year to visit family and so on. Mockingbird moved to Tracey, California, after their last visit. I’m sure several of them will become Second Chances converts.

This was part of the Children’s Section on Saturday. Lots of nice picture books!

The shelves look pretty with so many books faced outward, but Brandy is rushing to get more books listed, cleaned, labeled and on the shelves. A broken thermal ribbon in the labelling process delayed her a couple of days before the soft opening.

Second Chances Used Books is about half the size of Mockingbird, so words like “large” are relative.

Sections to check out:
— Buddhism is already a large section, with some classic works.
–In the case right next to it, Western Religion already shows a good selection.

–History encompasses General History, Military History, Classical, European and US. As the inventory grows Asian and African history will definitely become subcategories. There are some intriguing books in Political History, too.

–California and the West and Native Americans have their own bookcase, near the front of the store. This is a section that will grow, too.

–Cookbooks; she already has some great ones.
–Art; small but mighty.
–The collection of Alternative Health, Bodywork and Diet and Nutrition includes some good yoga books and some other bodywork volumes.

–Biography has some classics, some unusual selections and the promise of more works in the future.

Second Chances is in west Sonoma County, so of course there is a section on Mythology, Metaphysics, Astrology and Self-Help. There will also be a robust LGBTIQ section.

Two books from the History Section. I want both of them.

Brandy is intimidatingly well-read and the general fiction section is already chock-full of great writers you would expect. Genre is filling in, though. Take a look at:

–Mystery
–Romance
–Science Fiction
–Horror (tiny and Lovecraftian.)
–Poetry, Essays and Literary Criticism are small but solid sections.

Children’s Books and Teen Books already look great.

There were a few technical glitches, but the weekend went great!

Second Chances Used Books Sign with the Logo

On Tuesday, two thirds of the signs arrived. There is Brandy’s beautiful sign, capturing exactly the feeling you have when you walk into the store.

Sit a spell, turn those pages and relax.

Stop by, browse the books, and avail yourself of one of the Three Sisters, the comfy chairs that are not only, well, comfy, but in some way guardian spirits of the shop. They set a tone, they send a message; “This shop is a sanctuary from all the world’s craziness. Stop in, sit a spell, read a little, and take a portal to another time or place with you when you go.”

UPDATE: Wow, Friday and yesterday were busy days! The space was flooded with people. Adults and kids curled up in the chairs, paging through books, or sat on the floor. Customer after customer said how pleased they were to have a used bookstore back in town!

I volunteered for two shifts, on different days, at the library’s gift-wrapping station. Their slogan, “Buy local, wrap local.” Bring your gifts to the library and we will wrap them for you, or help you wrap them if you prefer.

My first shift started at 4:00pm on Friday. In my imagination, I was well-prepared, showing up with water, snacks and a book for slow times. I even had the book; Mary Oliver’s A Poetry Handbook. I’d been dipping into it in the evenings. It would have been the perfect book for a stint with slow spells and flurries of activity.

I spent a few hours Friday putting books on shelves at Second Chances Used Books

Here are some more.

I spent most of that day, though, helping my friend get her store ready for her soft opening, and when I arrived at the library I had only one of my three survival-kit items; water. There was some good news, though. I was in a library. They had books. And the Friends of the Library (which was where I had heard of the activity in the first place) had a big sale table with paperbacks for fifty cents. I spent a dollar—because why not?—on a copy of Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf. While I waited for customers, I followed Clarissa Dalloway as she left her house that lovely June morning, the morning of her party.

*

A confession first, that will surprise no one who knows my lowbrow genre reading tastes: My favorite Woolf book is Orlando. Naturally I love the story about a nearly-immortal character who changes sex and lives nearly four hundred years. To the Lighthouse is my second favorite. I have read excerpts from Mrs. Dalloway but never read the book.

*

The table was not staffed when I got there. It wasn’t staffed either day when I arrived, but it functioned as a self-service wrapping station quite well. When I showed up on Friday, an eleven-year-old girl was wrapping a present by herself. I offered to help, she politely declined. She was wrapping a gift for her teacher, she said. She was doing a pretty good job but she was using a lot of tape. I showed her the trick of folding in the sides of the paper first, then the bottom and top. “And less tape!” she said. She had picked bright red and light green paper with elves on it, and she chose a snowy white bow for the top. I think her teacher will be happy.

Food for Fines, an amnesty program.

Mrs. Dalloway is a reminder of how interested in mind, in thought and in memory, Woolf was, and how deeply observant, not only of the people around her, but her own mental processes. Woolf adeptly captures that chattering mental voice (my Buddhist friends call it monkey-mind), the voice that I imagine as coming from the front of my skull somehow. In a deep third-person point of view, Woolf’s circular, discursive sentences, the repeated phrases, the pauses, the contradictory clauses all ring with the truth of the voice in our heads. And how apparently effortlessly she glides out of one person’s head –I meant to say “character’s,” but these are people—into another’s, sometimes drawing back out of all of them to give us an omniscient point of view of an airplane or a motorcar before slipping cleanly back into Clarissa’s mind, or Peter’s, or the seriously troubled Septimus Warren Smith’s.

Clarissa Dalloway, Richard Dalloway, Peter Walsh and Lady Bruton, who are all of a certain class, think in the words and rhythms of that class. They think in clichés, but this is not a failing of the writer. Woolf chooses those phrases with intent, those collections of words that imply a meaning without producing one, a mirror image to the observation that Septimus Warren Smith is beginning to give words “a symbolic meaning.” For the Dalloways and their neighbors, these phrases reassure. They protect people from real memories, real insights.  Here is one of my favorites, as Lady Bruton greets Hugh Whitbread for luncheon. Whitbread, although he has influence, is often mocked behind his back.

“… But she wouldn’t let them run down her poor dear Hugh. She would never forget his kindness – he had really been remarkably kind – she forgot precisely on what occasion.”

*

The gift-wrapping station is set up between a bank of self-checkout machines and the coin-operated self-serve photocopier. For a gift wrapper, this means at any given time there can be somebody or somebodies moving about doing things, right over their shoulders, out of view. If you’re mildly paranoid, this can be uncomfortable.

Hello, have we met? I’m Mildly Paranoid.

*

Septimus Warren Smith displays the symptoms of Shell Shock, which we now call PTSD, certainly. But there is a darker current running underneath those characteristics; the delusions, the voices. Does he have schizophrenia?

*

A slim woman in a bright purple sweater came up to me. Her hair was tarnished-silver gray and cut in a bob. “I have a question,” she said. “You do free gift-wrapping, but where do the gifts come from?”

“You buy and bring your gifts and we’ll wrap them for you,” I said.

She stared. She put her hand over her mouth and started to laugh. “Of course!” she chortled, shaking her head.

The golden dress. This window is dedicated to all the first responders, a holiday Thank You.

“Shredding and slicing, dividing and subdividing, the clocks of Harley Street nibbled at the June day, counselled submission, upheld authority, and pointed out in chorus the supreme advantages of a sense of proportion, until the mound of time was so far diminished that a commercial clock, suspended above a shop in Oxford Street, announced genially and fraternally, as if it were a pleasure of Messrs. Rigby and Loundes to give the information gratis that it was half-past one.”

Holiday Fantasy

I wrapped a Giant Book of Madlibs for a woman. It was for her grand-daughter. She got it at Copperfields…. I may have to go get one.

For another woman I wrapped a book of activities to do in Napa and Sonoma counties. She bought it for her mother who just moved here. She also bought a beautiful book of wildlife photography, and I wrapped that in dark blue paper with silver stars.

*

The library is offering a fine-amnesty program, Food for Fines, through the end of the year. Bring some canned food for the food bank, and they will expunge your fines.

*

Throughout the book, Clarissa orders, exhorts, pleads with people to, “Remember the party! Remember my party!” Woolf never needs to use words like “plead,” or “exhort.” The placing of the dialogue, the cadence of it, carry Clarissa’s panic nicely. Clarissa is fifty-two. Her only child is an adolescent who has been drawn into the circle of a bitter, deeply religious woman who is completely different from Clarissa. Clarissa’s husband was invited to luncheon at Lady Bruton’s, whose luncheons are said to be most amusing, but Clarissa was not included.

Clarissa is a perfect hostess. Everyone says so. Even Peter Walsh, who says it to wound her (because she could, somehow, have been so much more), says it. So why is she so anxious?

*

On my second-day shift a stooped, white-haired man came up to the table. He put down a tiny bath-duckie. I wondered if he wanted me to wrap it. It’s a working-class duck, with a hard hat, a safety vest and a sledge hammer over one shoulder, if ducks have shoulders, if bath-ducks have shoulders. “This is for you,” he said.

“For me?” I said, like the heroine in a 1930s romantic novel. “Well, thank you.”

A working class bath duck.

The first day, when I left at six, it was dark. Despite my coat and the fact that the bank’s temperature sign read 57 degrees, I could not stop shivering as I walked to where I had parked my car. Main Street was lighted up, and those balls of lights that look kind of silly and even cheesy during the day looked like magic.

Main Street Lights.

Update: Sometimes a typo takes on meaning. I wrongly titled this “Second Changes,” originally. While I like that, it’s not the name of the store.

Brandy is opening a used bookstore in the location of the old Mockingbird Books. Brandy sold her share of Mockingbird and went on to work at Copperfield’s for several years. The two remaining partners of Mockingbirds opened a second Sonoma County location in Guerneville which is still in operation, then moved the Sebastopol store to Tracy, California.

When Brandy found a way she could open her own business, to her surprise, the front suite of the original location was still available to rent.

The day the bookcases and the counter arrived!

This makes Second Chances Used Books a much smaller store than Mockingbird, but I can already see that the inventory is carefully curated. Book lovers and discriminating gift buyers will always be able to find something here.

Unlike Mockingbird, Second Chances plans to buy books from customers as well, and I know Brandy will be keeping an eye on the inventory to see what turns over. For example, she and I were just talking about Elena Ferrante the other day. The Ferrante trend seems to have cooled, but will the announcement of a new book coming out change that?

Brandy has a lot to do before Saturday! A large part of the labor will be getting cleaned, listed books onto the shelves. I’ve offered to help but I hope a few other of her town friends can pitch in. The other retail tasks are daunting: setting up a credit card service; keeping track of the progress on her beautiful sign; making all the necessary connections with Amazon because she will be listing and selling online… it’s quite a list.

At times, it seems  like there are lots of books. At others, it is clear that the books she has now will not fill the shelves she has now. And it’s clear she could use some more bookscases.

She has some lovely overstuffed chairs that we’ve dubbed The Three Sisters, because this is the kind of store that invites you to sit down and read.

I’ve observed an interesting phenomenon; seeing empty bookcases lining the walls, and orderly stacks of books on the floor, people come and knock on the door. They say, “You’re closing! It’s so sad!” It’s as if they walked past the empty suite for three months and never noticed everything. This isn’t bad; it gives the proprietor a chance to say when she’ll be opening, but it’s interesting. The other day a young man said he only comes up to Sebastopol two or three times a year, and clearly Mockingbird was still in place that last time.

Some days it seems like many books; some days it does not.

I’ve been helping clean books and already I’m having the same problem I had in the previous store; I can’t touch a stack of books without finding ones I want, immediately. Even when it’s a topic that isn’t important to me, I still find them. Yesterday I was cleaning a batch of cookbooks and food books, and there were two gluten-free books, one atop the other. I know just who could use those.

I can’t wait for the opening. This is a rumor only, but there might be cake. I’m just saying.

Later that afternoon, from 4:00 pm to 6:00 pm, I’ll be at the Sebastopol Library, 7014 Bodega Ave (corner of Bodega and High Street) helping with free gift wrapping for the gifts you bought downtown, like, maybe, at Second Chances!

The shop’s address is 6932 Sebastopol Avenue, Sebastopol, between The Toyworks and the ceramics and fused glass shop… half a block from Screamin Mimi’s.Here is the Facebook page. Come check the shop out this weekend! There is no sign yet, but you’ll know it from the whimsical decorations in the pop-out window.

These ornaments and more adorn the window.