Our Approaching Separation

We moved to Seattle when my husband retired. We'd visited before. We loved Seattle. Still do. Had never lived anywhere up here before we moved, permanently. We'd followed his job until he retired, and we'd ended up in Southern California. Made good friends there, had some interesting jobs, but I hated it. It was too hot. Couldn't wait to get away when he retired. We might have gone almost anywhere we wanted at that point. We would have liked to go back to San Francisco, where we'd lived quite happily for a dozen years, but we couldn't buy a house there, and we really wanted a house. So, we came here. Seattle reminded us both of San Francisco; it was cool, it was pretty, it was damp, and it was a real city. After six suburban years, in which I had to learn to drive to get to work, or even to go to a movie, I needed to be back in a city.

Just to be clear, a city -- a real city, as opposed to a jumped village or suburb -- is defined by its neighborhoods. These must be discreet, distinct and walkable. A neighborhood may be good or bad, but it isn't one at all if it isn't recognizable as such, coming or going. There have to be cars parked on the street. There has to be someone awake when you aren't. It can't be new, and it can't be uniformly tended, and it can't just be some randomly designated area of population, separated from its neighbors by strip malls, and christened by real estate developers. (Hilariously, in Southern California our condo was part of "Hampton Court" and our town, far from fresh water, was called "Fountain Valley.") No. Real cities have real neighborhoods, and real neighborhoods, while they may have much in common, are not all alike. Never the less, for any not lucky enough to live in such a place, here's a quick list of some of the requirements:

Old People.
Kids.
Bums.
Bus service.
Taxis.
A drugstore.
A hardware store, with a selection of lightbulbs.
A bakery.
A shoe-repair.
A movie house.
A good Vietnamese sandwich.
Falafel.
A newsstand.
A bar.
Bookstores.

Please note that last plural, as I'll be coming back to that.

Luckily for me, we found a house in a nice neighborhood, and I got a job in another one. After about a month of arranging the furniture in our new house, and putting up bookcases, I went and interviewed for a job in a bookstore. It's all I know. Woman hired me, but not to work in her bookstore, or in the neighborhood where it was, and still is, but to work in another shop with the same name, Twice Sold Tales, in a different neighborhood, the University District.

The fellow who gave me my first job in Seattle is a sweet man named John Watkins. I liked him, liked the neighborhood, and I liked the bookshop. Too many fucking cats, but still. (Evidently, I was the first employee to ever refuse my "turn" cleaning the litter-boxes. In Southern California I'd worked in a bookstore with parrots. Parrots are hateful. I hated those birds. Still, I never had to clean their cage. I told John, he could fire me if he had to, but I don't keep pets, don't clean up after other people's, and I was never going to clean a litter-box, even if I liked his cats, which, frankly, I never did, all that much. This caused a brief stand-off, but John's too nice to let a little thing like that get in the way of an otherwise symbiotic working relationship. True, I did end up cleaning cat-puke off of some of the finest books in the display window, among other things, so I wasn't completely uncooperative. I was a team player. Besides, Yeti was special, may she rest in peace.)

I liked working for John. He's a used books dealer, and a Scot, so nobody there was getting rich, including John, but he was eminently fair, a good boss, good company, and he taught me a lot. Once every couple of weeks, his co-owner, the lady with the shop where I first interviewed, would come over and spend the day. Jamie Lutton started selling books from a push-cart. Now, she's an institution. She's quite mad, you know, but she's also quite brilliant, and she loves books. So does John. Both can be quite ruthless about books, though, when the mood takes them. I've seen Jamie pull dead stock from the shelves with exactly the same enthusiasm with which she might have bought it a year before. I've watched John price books with all the care and attention with which his ancestors counted their groats on a cold winter's day, but I've also seen him price a valuable book at just what he paid for it, so an underpaid hireling with tastes beyond his income -- ahem -- might have it, and I've seen him pay for books he may not need just to give some half-crazed starveling off The Ave. enough money for a meal, or a fix. The owners of Twice Sold Tales absolutely hate thieves. They won't traffic with them, behind or before the counter. John will chase them down the street. Seen him do it. With that one exception, I can't say that I've ever known John to actively dislike anyone, even people he probably should.

Working in a neighborhood bookstore, specially a used books shop, one has to have a certain tolerance for eccentricity. Helps to not be in a position to judge others, much. Now and again, I had to step over Jamie in the aisles, if she happened to be stretched out on the floor; playing with a cat, making some adjustment to her back, pretending to take a nap, reading. Every once in a while, if for example, some unsuspecting kid happened up to the cash register with a paperback of As You Like It, when Jamie was there, she might begin reciting Shakespeare, at break-neck speed, and then tell the thoroughly astonished teenager that if he could identify the play, or say the next line, she'd give him the book for nothing. Then she would prompt him, repeatedly. Seen more than one leave with a free book, and not a few abandon their money on the counter and try to slip away. John hoards Little Nemo reprints in a stash upstairs. He built himself a a wooden boat, thankfully, not in the bookstore, and I've known him to offer complete strangers a day on the water, so long as they are willing to "crew." (Never going to happen, John, though thanks again for asking me.)

The customers and sellers in a used shop can be every bit as unusual as the owners and the staff. One of the privileges of having worked closely with John, if only for a year or so, was watching him talk to the most unlikely individuals, all the while just working away, buying or pricing or what have you, as needed. Mr. Watkins is actually a rather shy soul, and not just when compared to his more outgoing business partner from the Capital Hill store. The University District shop was always John's. In his own store, as the owner, I mean to say, he was always the man in charge, but in a very quiet, largely unassuming way. If asked, he will confess, that yes, the place is his. Dealing with some outraged matron who may feel she has not been made a fair offer on her shopping bag of water-damaged romance novels, I never heard him raise his voice. Listening to yet another junky's sad fiction of why he needs at least three dollars "to get back to Tacoma," I've never heard John haggle. He is invariably polite, even to the truly insane, the sadly broken, and hellishly unhappy souls who drift every few days through his door. And to anyone expressing even the least enthusiasm for sailing, so long as fiberglass and the like do not enter the conversation...

Earlier I made a rather clumsy point about the need for not one, but many bookstores in any proper neighborhood in any real city. A single bookstore suggests that a place is not utterly barbarous. Two or more bookstores, and two or more good used bookstores on the same block, is an indication of actual civilization. The University District, when I first worked there, had roughly half a dozen bookshops, good and bad. (Well, only one that was really bad, now long gone, and even there, I found good books.) I now work in a great bookstore, more than one hundred years old. I left John Watkins' Twice Sold Tales, not because I did not like working there, but frankly because my present employer offered me a better job, with benefits. John wished me well, even provided a reference. I'm still grateful to my old boss at Twice Sold Tales. And I'm happy where I am. Even got the place to start selling used books. John and a friend often stop by my desk whilst out for their lunchtime constitutional. We gossip about books, and the neighborhood, and now and then I remember to ask after the cats.
Just today, John announced that he will be closing his shop, and taking his online business off with him to Vashon Island, or some such god-forsaken place. (Do they even have phở there?) I understand. His landlord would rather have a redundant multinational bank where the bookstore has been. I can't tell you just how sad it will be, come the day, walking up the Ave. to my favorite gyro stand, to not be able to look through that front window at the bookstore, cluttered with old books, a bust of Shakespeare, and a model dinosaur or two, to not see John's gnomish smile, reading at his desk, or typing at his computer, a cat on his shoulders, and possibly another in his lap.

The neighborhood can not afford another such loss. I can't.

Places change, cities specially, or they die. Nothing so tiresome as listening to life-time-residents lament the loss of the typewriter-repair, or the place their grandmother took them shopping for a confirmation-dress. Life moves on. I acknowledge my partisanship, but really, to have just the one other good bookstore on the Ave.? Right there, cheek by jowl with the university? And the grand old Neptune movie theater already shuttered, just a week ago? Is this civilization? I ask you.

John has insisted he will still be coming by my desk at the bookstore where I now work, just to say hello, have a bit of a chin-wag. I sincerely hope that he does. I will want very much to know how he is getting on with his new venture. I wish him every success. It will not be quite the same, though. I doubt even this will much change my friend, John Watkins. He comes of good stock. (Those people could live on oats, you know, oats.) I imagine he will always be the same amiable fellow who gave me my first job in Seattle, and became one of my first friends here. I trust in the immutability of such characters.

But the bookstore? When I was in last, I bought an old book of letters and diaries by Anne Thackeray Ritchie. Cost me eight bucks. Had John been there, it would have cost me even less. Doesn't matter. It was an excellent price. The clerk didn't know me. It's been years since I worked there.

Go. Go to Twice Sold Tales in the University District, Seattle, if you have the chance, while you still do.

As for me, maybe I'll drop by tomorrow and commiserate with Mister Watkins, about the lamentable state of civilization, etc., or maybe he'll drop by my desk, and we will make what we can of the time.

I left something off my list before. Can't think how I missed it.

Good neighbors.

Neighborhood just won't be the same.