Trading Those Fevers for Tranquility

"The heads of strong old age are beautiful

Beyond all grace of youth." 

-- Robinson Jeffers, from his poem, Promise of Peace

For a minute there, I was a kid again, or at least the youngest person in the room. That hadn't happened in a very long time. When I was called back from furlough I was younger -- by just a bit admittedly -- than the majority of my coworkers. It was a startling turn. I've spent my working life in retail, and most of my life in independent bookstores. There have always been older and wiser heads than mine in every bookstore where I've worked, but there were always kids too, at least people young enough for me to call them "kids." 

Traditionally young people take bookstore jobs. The pay is low, the hours sometimes odd. The work is physical and mostly done on foot. Books in mass are heavy and shelves are often low. Quiet as a bookstore can be, when we are lucky there will be many people in the shop, many questions, bustle. The holidays in retail start early and even in the age of electronic orders and daily home deliveries people still go out to shop and do not always know what for until it's put in front of them. That's the better part of the job, the part you have to like to be a bookseller, otherwise you might as well be stocking groceries or unloading trucks at Target -- both perfectly respectable things to do, I hasten to add. Books make the work and books make the work better. Makes sense then that a young person -- a literate and culturally engaged young person -- would take a job in a bookstore. Some of 'em have even been straight out of high school, others a bit older but still younger than me by the day. What else is one meant to do with an undergraduate degree in say Eng. Lit. or French? Turns out that older people keep these supposedly temporary jobs, some of us anyway, and the ones that do, the ones who stay, are booksellers. Don't know when exactly that happens, and it doesn't happen to everyone who works a long time in a big store. There are other roles, other work with just as much skill required and dignity owed. In this fragile peace with the pandemic, back to work after more than a year, I looked up one morning and all around me I saw naught but gray heads. This has changed since, but at the time it was very strange, like going to work in an actual metaphor for print culture.

My first work in a bookstore came about when I was still a child who simply wouldn't leave and did not have enough money for the books I so desperately required. Sweep up, stack boxes, take out the trash and earn credit, buy books. (The job hasn't changed that much now I think about it and neither have I.) Thirty six years ago, when I was twenty-three I took home my first paycheck from a bookstore and haven't worked at anything else since. I remember thinking my bosses terribly adult if not actually old at the time. When I became a boss myself I was still in my early twenties and I felt a bit of a fraud despite having been told all my life that I was older than my years. (That stops eventually, blossom. One day the years caught up with the mug.) When a decade or two and a few bookstores later I ceased to be a boss I finally looked the part but didn't want it anymore. It was a great relief to never make another schedule, review or submit a budget, work without pay, or fire people. 

As I've noted, those who stayed during the peak of the pandemic and most of us who have been slowly coming back to the bookstore are all of us old hands. Perfectly sensible. Despite this brave new cybernated and systematized economy, those of us who know books from way back, book folk as it were, seem best suited to bookstores just now. The hours are limited, the customers loyal and familiar, and we remember where things are -- or at least where we think they ought to be -- and we know the where and the way things ought to be put and what might sell during the Holidays. (Though every year the day after Christmas there are those big stacks of of the books we were all convinced were going to sell like brisket at a barbecue stand and didn't. Yesterday's fish come January first, if I may mix my proteins and or metaphors.) We venerable clerks may have to write down all of our passwords on scratch paper. We misremember the order in which this must be entered before that in creating a  new "customer record." But we know how to find a book for the husband who's a birder. We can guess what your aunt wants to read once she's worked her way through Elizabeth Warren, Louise Penny, and Roxane Gay. I won't say we are wise, but we remember what matters, or at least what we've sold.

I am old enough now to like working with younger people. Not sure when that happened either. I have always preferred the company of grown ups. Children can be deadly dull even to other children and while adults can be frighteningly remote and deeply confusing, they don't ask you "why?' so persistently or hand you as many wet things. Spoiled for choice, I have always liked old people. Old people are easier to understand, even when they aren't easy company. I grew up with old people simple and sly, sweet and not and while they needn't be nice neither do they disappoint much. You can see 'em coming. Know what you're getting with the old straight away: loud or quiet, adorable or irascible, shaky, slow, blind, deaf, dear. On the other hand the young look so uniformly promising, disappointment seems inevitable. It's easy to forget what they are not likely to know, and to be shocked by just how much they have yet to learn. I am for example appalled to regularly meet a college-aged person who does not know the difference between fiction and nonfiction. How does one not understand nouns and modifiers by the time one gets to university? Surely the explanation is in the name? Can't be that many business administration majors anywhere. Takes the shine right off the new penny. When the old are rude or dim, well it could happen to any of us. We're all getting on. The old have earned the right to express a certain discomfort in this world. On the other hand, I'm frankly shocked when the young are unpleasant. Young men in particular were not very nice to me when I was one, but now that I'm harmless and plump, who would want to hurt my feelings? Everybody likes old dogs, right? I forget puppies can bite. Maybe it's as simple as youth is beautiful and thrilling and sometimes exhausting and never much interested in the rest of us. They have every right not to be. Might return my hello though when you come to pay for that Blue Book and #2 pencil.

"They that enter into the world are too often treated with unreasonable rigour by those that were once as ignorant and heady as themselves; and distinction is not always made between the faults which require speedy and violent eradication, and those that will gradually drop away in the progression of life." -- Samuel Johnson, from his Idler #25

On a practical and particularly on a retail level, even the meanest old man can usually be got away from which is not always the case with the middle-aged. It's true that the middle aged professional, male or female, has money to spend and they do seem to read, but they often also have unrealistic expectations of the service required to satisfy their needs and the deference due to them personally. Perhaps it's class more than age; the weight of the watch, the size of the ring. Old people tend to courtesy even when they may have lost the knack of it for want of company. Children are charming and selfish and largely forgivable even when rude. Also? There's usually someone to carry them off when they get fractious. The old can be equally loud and abrasive, but mostly lack the stamina of a roaring toddler, thanks be. I would generally prefer the loudest coot to a screaming baby any day.

Still, it's hard not to admire the young. So pretty! So smooth! So quick! The young are often shy and or largely unaware of their affect. It can be most endearing. With the bookish ones it doesn't usually take much to get them going, even if I do remind them of a chatty old party at the bus-stop noticing the book in their hand. As readers they all seem to have some great enthusiasm -- may not be mine, probably nothing to do with me or what I read, but still thrilling to find. They make for splendid colleagues most of 'em for the just this reason. Proust to Pusheen, when the young love something it is with a passion. Most attractive that, and needed. It is good to be reminded of the time when every book was new and most were still yet to be read. I miss that youthful exuberance just now. Not that the rest of us are without enthusiasms, but these tend to be nearer my own and so all too familiar. Yeah. We can all agree, Maira Kalman is way cool. What's new?

What the young do for me personally is remind me of all I that do not know. They read what I never would. They "follow" things I never knew existed. They are naturally part of things that otherwise flows right 'round me like so much street noise in my fairly quiet and sedentary life. Turns out for example that one may need to know what something called "Minecraft" is after all. They tell me about the new poets and novelists -- say under age fifty -- and how gender is being reconstructed, and how the earth may yet be saved. The young know everything. Why resent what never changes? Go ahead, alleviate some of my obvious ignorance. I could stand some improvement.

The other great charm and danger of the young and of the rising generation in particular is their willingness to not let things pass. Johnson says, "It is very natural for young men to be vehement, acrimonious, and severe." Same as it ever was then. I would hope that mine was the last generation trained to not challenge the inequities and prejudices in this world, at least and until we were supposedly of an age to do something about them. Turns out we were usually too late and largely without power or inclination by the time we tried. Perhaps this was always the intention. "Thus is life trifled away in preparations to do what never can be done, if it be left unattempted till all the requisites which imagination can suggest are gathered together," said Dr. Johnson (Rambler #71.) 

The impatience of the young finds expression now in ways I admit I find breathtaking, even a little terrifying frankly, and they do this in public places and with people to whom I was taught to show only deference. Startling, but largely a trend I think in the right direction. (Those of us who came of age in terrible early days of AIDS had to overcome, most of us anyway, an almost ingrained disbelief in our right to stand up for ourselves, to survive. It may seem self-evident. It wasn't, certainly not to me. I had to be taught to expect and demand my own survival and to fight for the survival of others like me and unlike.)

"It has always been the practice of those who are desirous to believe themselves made venerable by length of time to censure the new comers into life, for want of respect to gray hairs and sage experience, for heady confidence in their own understandings, for hasty conclusions upon partial views, for disregard of counsels which their fathers and grandfathers are ready to afford them, and a rebellious impatience of that subordination to which youth is condemned by nature, as necessary to its security from evils into which it would be otherwise precipitated by the rashness of passion and the blindness of ignorance." -- Rambler #50

I can of course afford to admire at least a little the moral inflexibility of the young because I am unlikely to come to their notice and so to suffer much from it. Not all my friends and contemporaries are likely to be so lucky. The high-minded opprobrium of the newer puritans tends to be directed at the authority nearest to hand; teachers, parents, public figures, and of these am I none. Always the way. I count professors among my friends, and high school teachers, and librarians, and for them I worry, not simply because they are my friends but because there would seem to be no one to back them should they be accused of insensitivity, perceived aggression, etc. Happens. Meanwhile the employers of the respectable middle-aged to old seem to have abandoned nearly any standard of objectivity in these confrontations with youth's New Model Army. When challenged nowadays it seems the strategy is to assume the guilt of offending elder, concede the right of youth to their indignation, assign the former to rigorous self re-examination and comfort the later in their feelings. In other words to do as near to nothing as may be done without obvious injury to the institution, same as it ever was.  Meanwhile villains large and small keep at their worst. One hopes the same relentlessness with which the young seek to supress the word "niggardly" will one day take their unremitting and well organized retribution to the doors of greater power. How I should like to live to see that! To see righteousness carried off the campuses again and into the heart of the confederacy, to board rooms, and pulpits, to the hidden dens of the most stubborn resistance and power. In this I wish the young nothing but well. Go on! fuck 'em up kids!

Easy for me to sit and hope for better from and for the young. Harder as always to do anything myself, a point which would doubtlessly be made to me if I weren't such a comparatively anonymous old fart. May happen yet. In the meanwhile, typical of my stage in life, my economic station, and my generation, I try to keep my head down mostly. No one has to explain their pronouns to me. I have learned to ask politely from a genuine sympathy, now that I have a clue. My curiosity is no one's responsibility but my own. I so get that.

There are advantages to looking older. As I may have mentioned, I am now by all appearances completely harmless. Why mourn the sexual tension to which I never contributed much anyway? That I look like Santa Claus is all too true, even after a serious trimming of the beard to accommodate the new masks. It is a choice, though not from any desire to draw attention to the resemblance. I suspect clean-shaven I would be Pickwick. I am nearsighted, fat, relatively cheerful. I sometimes wear a flat hat. I lack the height and the chin for a more gradual and handsome decline into my dotage. Without the full beard my face has all the gravitas of a Matt Groening cartoon. With my full whiskers I could at least look arch, even sometimes wrathful -- though I try not to overplay the part. I haven't much actual fight in me. In practice, clerking in retail, I can ill-afford confrontation. Even after nearly twenty years in the same place and thirty five in the business, my employment is still dependent on the absence of complaint. (Increasingly not unlike my academic friends, now I think of it, though without anything like the possibility of tenure or organized protest.) I must be well liked to eat. Harmless can't hurt me.

 "Such is the condition of life that something is always wanting to happiness. In youth we have warm hopes, which are soon blasted by rashness and negligence, and great designs which are defeated by inexperience. In age, we have knowledge and prudence, without spirit to exert, or motives to prompt them; we are able to plan schemes, and regulate measures, but have not time remaining to bring them to completion." 

Thus dear old Sam Johnson again, this time in his Rambler #196 (all of forty-three years old by the way when he wrote that.) Far be it from me to disagree with The Great Cham*. Actually I am aware of great schemes being planned elsewhere in the building, just not by me. Not my business. Bookstores change or they die. One must trust to those well off the sales floor to keep the enterprise moving ahead. (I wish them well, and not just because it will be another decade before I can retire.) Looking around me I must say a remarkable lot of work is still being done. My fellow clerks all of a certain age all bustle still, if a bit slower. In part this is from want of help. We are fewer than we were and will we hope again soon be not sufficient to the day. Carts get pushed, books shelved and retrieved. "Book have not so much served me for instruction as exercise," said the wise Montaigne. Indeed. We nonetheless do try to keep the place looking lively and new. Displays change, new books come in, recommendations are made, trends followed and or confuted. We may not know as much as the young, but we know what we are doing when it comes to pushing books.

There was a brief satisfaction in being suddenly younger or at least further back on the shorter curve. I was reminded for example that my responsibilities are lighter now than they have been for many years. Not anchored to a buying desk, I find myself shelving books I had no part in ordering, answering questions from customers and not just on weekly unemployment forms, or from my employers. I've enjoyed making displays for the pure pleasure of improvement. I'm glad of a chat about book clubs other than my own. These were things for which until recently I had not the same luxury of time. Time is important to a crew more persistent than quick. Ironically my recent illness played a part in easing my return to work too. There was no one to judge me harshly for moving so slow. The sympathy for my pain was real and without pity, as no one near me was entirely without some symptom of impairment or decline. I'll see your bum knee and raise you a kidney stone. More than any of this I was free in my enthusiasms as the consequences were not likely to put me much in anyone's way. Freshen up the Staff Recommendations? Why sure. Do something to make the poetry shelves prettier? Make a table display from butcher's paper and lots of single copies? Put the cookbooks in order? Get on with it. If it doesn't work it can be put back, done over, tried again. Not a sprint but a... what? Low impact walk for heart health? I did good work with no one to notice until it was done. I liked the simplicity of alphabetizing. Felt good to have a job. I might have been twenty three again, in this if nothing else.

More though is the satisfaction of being one among the majority, one gray head among many.  All around me I found familiarity, empathy and support. We survivors wish each other well and happy. Happy to be back. Discontent, the birthright of the young, tends in time to settle into a persistent if largely harmless pessimism expressed in a gentle growling and far less likely to shout. To a remarkable degree we get along better than ever, perhaps because going along now constitutes a shared and attainable pace. I discover that we are all the easier to like and to please for being gentled by the years. 

It is sobering to think that I am already older than for example Horace or Dickens ever lived to be. My husband being older yet is now nearly the age at which Johnson saw his time out. My mother at ninety has survived all but one of her contemporaries and lived to a greater age than the many of the old ladies she used to see to as a kindness and a duty. I look around me at work and see not a few of my friends either ready for retirement or already back from retirement part-time. None seem unhappy to find themselves so. 

Getting older is fraught with embarrassments large and small, and limitations tend to pile up for want of anyplace to hide them. I don't scare shoplifters anymore. Need help with those boxes? Well, I am not the one to ask. I am not the reader I was either. I don't keep up. I am more like Dr. Johnson now and still "... read a great deal in a desultory manner, without any scheme of study, as chance throws books in (my) way" and not often straight through to the end. I am too old to be bothered mostly. Got it. Time is short. Moving on. Most of the books I read now are older even than me. Been true for a long time. Newness is not much of a temptation anymore. It is not as though I was not always drawn to old things and revered texts. When I was young I felt I was already and always behind in my reading. Now I know that to have been untrue. This proved not an altogether bad thing. I read widely and much. I read a great deal more than I do now. If that was because of a false sense of my own inferiority so be it. Now I am also unconcerned by what other people may have read before I did, or with what other people read generally. You buy books? Thank you. As a bookseller I am glad of the custom. Read what you want. I do, more now than I ever did when I was young. What I want to read at this point is likelier to be in my library than on the shelf at the bookstore.

When I was young I read to have read, to be seen reading, to know what I assumed others knew already. I was untroubled by ambiguity in the text -- and ambiguity was big at the time. I read in pursuit of a better education, a better life. Got it. I read in defiance of my actual education and my limited prospects and with all the time in the world. I read with the confidence that I would be better for all the reading I could do. I am. If I am a bit past it now, I got here honestly enough and where I am suits me better. My reduced ambitions better suit both my purse and my person. I am largely content now my contents have settled.

If as is the case right now I want to reread Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson and to read it with friends and strangers in a virtual book club, this seems to strike no one now as odd and I find myself much encouraged by the enthusiasm expressed by my colleagues young and old. It seems my taste now suits my face. I have the figure now of a man who carries antique volumes of The Rambler in the big back pocket of  his loose fit jeans. What was once an endearing eccentricity now looks entirely right and proper, like... well, suspenders on a fat man, I guess. 

Bookstores are suited to fat men in suspenders. If we are lucky they may also have wise men and women, none of them young who know more: how for example shipping actually works as well as how it ought, how school orders are filled and correctly billed, which picture books might be best for this child or from that grandparent, vendors' discounts and the names of publishers' reps, when to return and reorder, what to read and why. In the best of all possible worlds there will again be young booksellers too to teach us what we don't know and to make the place smarter in every sense.  And when this happens again as I have every faith that it will here I'll be, nearer the middle than either end, sitting on the floor shelving low in biography and telling people young and old and largely indifferent that they really ought to read the essays of Samuel Johnson. Young and old we live in hope, yes?

"It is seldom that we find either men or places such as we expect them. Yet it is necessary to hope, though hope should always be deluded, for hope itself is happiness, and its frustrations, however frequent, are yet less dreadful than its extinction." --  Idler #58

* The title was assigned Johnson by the comic novelist Tobias Smollett and it mystified me for ages. Turns out "Cham" was yet another older and predictably British mispronunciation/misspelling of Khan. (Ah, my beloved British! They do so love bending the world to their own language!) Smollett's jest stuck. The caricature of Johnson as literary despot was popular and not altogether wrong. It was said, I hasten to add, with a grin and with as much affection as fear.