Preface to Plates: A Christmas Concatenation

(By way of introduction, here's the preface to my new book of short essays and stories. The title is Plates: A Christmas Concatenation. It sells for $16.00 and can be ordered through the University Book Store @ Toll Free: 1.800.335.READ )

 Everybody has that one friend. Sometime in July this person starts counting down the days until Christmas. Let's be honest, I say "friend" but nobody likes this person. If you are this person, nobody likes you. Well, nobody likes you when you do this. Nobody. And nobody needs another reason to not like anybody else these days. Think about it. In addition to the ever widening political divide, everybody's got a reason to find the rest of us annoying. There is good cause not to much like humanity as a whole nowadays, but individually it tends to come down to very particular behaviors: the woman who eats carrots every day in the breakroom, the guy who insists his growling dog is "usually friendly," the person who can't tell a story without directions. Life online is in some ways simpler because you basically get to scroll past the bus-stop smoker and the couple fighting over meth. Still, you can't get away entirely. There are still people who regularly encourage you to find out which Disney princess you are, the proud owners of reptiles, defensive readers of Brené Brown, the guy who wants to show you pictures of his corrective surgery, and the Christmas-count-downers. We all have access to a calendar, you petty sadist. We all know how badly we did mailing out cards last year, and the people on our list who ended up with a gas-station gift-card. There really is no good reason to remind us when we are standing in our underwear in front of the refrigerator, trying to survive an August heatwave, that time is running out to get our orders in for fruitcake. Seriously, if you do this, you are a bad person, but you can still change. Just stop it. You feel the urge to mention how fast Christmas is coming up, don't. Dickens believed people can change, so in the true Sprit of Christmas I guess I probably do too.

I'm not being a "hater." I actually have no problem with the trash who keep their twinkle-lights up on the trailer year 'round. Find such harmless cheer as you are able, fellow redneck. Life is genuinely hard. And anybody who's Christmas tree stays up through January, we'll just agree to disagree. When it comes to the holidays I am generally very much live and let live. Really the only two types I find intolerable are the white gays who want to explain Kwanza to me every damned year, and those "only X days until Christmas" people. (What in the Sam Hill is wrong with you?!)

Just so you know, I've become something of a Christmas queen myself. I've aged into a strong physical Santa vibe: belly, beard, rosy, jolly. Nobody to blame but myself, though it is my beloved husband who's been making all the pie and cookies for forty years that helped get me here. (Food Is Love.) I do an annual reading of Truman Capote's A Christmas Memory at the bookstore where I work and I may be the only one in the joint who's happy when they switch to the Christmas music mix. The Holidays are sorta my thing. So it is that I find myself with such a strong backlist of seasonal scribblings. No, I did not sit down and think to write a collection of Christmas pieces. Like those last curls of wrapping paper too good to throw away but not long enough to be really useful, I find I have lots of stray thoughts on Christmas and not a few pieces rather randomly tagged as related, so here they are.

Many of the little essays herein started out as introductions or encores to my holiday reading. Anybody who's been may remember some of these. I've left out a few things I actually still like, because I found there was no way to disentangle them from their original occasion and setting. When I tried, they fell to nothing and seemed not worth saving after all. (Never explain a joke after, or rely on dated references, particularly at length. Yesterday is gone. Different time. Let it go.)  A couple things I've included aren't really to do with Christmas at all beyond the fact that I mentioned the day for one reason or another. I've kept these because they seemed to me in keeping with the spirit if not the letter of the law, as it were. Not every thought of Christmas is a happy one. Other pieces are light to the point of triviality, but I'm comfortable with that. Not a few are darker than would be usual in this sort of thing, more expressive of the emotion with which they were written than with any clear idea I might have intended to convey. I preserve these here, just as they are and without apology. Could be worse, I could be one of those relentlessly cheerful souls who actually sits down at the computer and think that what the world really needs is another little collection of insipid cheer; another heartwarming book about a family being saved by a puppy in a Christmas bow, another seasonal cozy mystery, new and inferior illustration for A Visit from St. Nicholas, more Christmas in July Lifetime and Hallmark pap. That ain't me, sweetie. 

If this hasn't convinced you yet to put this little book down and walk away, I should just warn you that I am a sentimentalist as well as grump. (You'll find this is still a very popular combo in Very Special Holiday Episodes of American sitcoms. You damned kids get off my lawn! For me?! God bless us, everyone! Hey, if it ain't broke.) So any I might not drive off by being a snappish atheistic smartass, I may yet alienate by going all gooey about the good old folks to home and grandma's kitchen, or by too warmly or too often remembering the dead. Again, no apologies. Seems we may all have a part to play and evidently this is mine.

I could say that I wish everything in here was better than it is -- because I do -- but I have learned to let that go as best I can. Best I could do with what I have. Hope you might like some of it.

One final note, specifically on my very short Christmas stories. Unlike the essays herein, I never thought to see these little fictions again. They first appeared as my snarky captions to a series of vintage Christmas photographs posted online by a dear friend with an excellent eye for kitsch and commentary. I made up these little stories to go with the pictures and hopefully to make my friend laugh. When it came time to gather more than a decade of my Christmas scraps together, I was reminded of these unusual and largely forgotten bits o' fiction. I do not have the imaginative gifts for invented stories. (Wrote a whole novel once that proved this to my disappointment.) So why reprint these little squibs? Well, there were more of them than I'd remembered, and I found they still made me smile. I decided as an experiment to see if I could read them without the photographs on which they were written to riff. Maybe I'm wrong, but I rather like them naked. So why not? Think of them as regular, sometimes bitter little laughs between my more usual pontifications, preachments, and poorly reasoned flibertigibittetery. And yes, that is a word. I made it up. I can do that. My book. Enjoy. 

And Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays if you are reading this sometime between Thanksgiving and the end of January. Otherwise maybe put it in the box of Xmas decorations and take it out when you're ready to put up the lights next year. I don't want to be one of those people.

A Caricature

Barney Frank at University Book Store - Seattle

More Books! Are Better Than A Sweater!

John Cleese - the Audio

Bradley Craft Presents an Evening of William Cowper

Breakfast at the Bookstore #2

Breakfast at the Bookstore #1

Our first ever podcast!

A Preview, As It Were

Garrison Keillor introduces his newest book The Keillor Reader at Univer...

Upcoming Event

This is my friend, Nick DiMartino.  He's got a new novel out, a mystery called Student Union.  It's a page-turner.  I just finished it tonight.  Come Tuesday, the 29th, at 7PM, I'll be introducing him at the University Book Store.  He'll be reading and signing.  Come check it out.

We Have Signage

Remembering the Smile of Julie Roth

Dickens says somewhere, "I feel an earnest and humble desire, and shall do till I die, to increase the stock of harmless cheerfulness."  What a very old fashioned, very Victorian notion and -- to our modern ears -- a suspiciously modest ambition to have been expressed by so great a novelist.  Dickens' was not a modest talent and he was not averse to celebrity -- it might be said, as Jane Smiley did in her brief biography of the novelist, that he invented it in the modern, literary sense.  Humility then might seem more a matter of convention than conviction from such a source.  Moreover, in our own day, when any pop-rhymester may proclaim his own "genius" as a matter seemingly of course and celebrity and even notoriety would seem to be the standard by which we judge the value of any individual achievement, to say nothing of art or artist, "to increase the stock of harmless cheerfulness" might seem a mystifying ambition, little worthy of note in such an established genius as Dickens save as an example of what we might now call the "humble-brag."

I don't think so, in this case.  Even the darkest novels of Charles Dickens brim with an elemental pleasure in recording every instance of good humor, marking every kindness and occasion of optimism, any small happiness that might arise realistically even in the midst of the most despairing narrative.  It is indicative of the novelist's own enjoyment in life that he could rarely deny even his most disagreeable characters a smile, if only at the expense of their humorlessness, but more to the point, in portraying, for example the very real indignities of poverty and injustice, in even the most debased and intractable circumstances, he allows for unexpected happiness; for the joy in a meal, the loyalty of a friend, the love of a mother, the memory of a lost love, a dance, a joke, a drink, a smile.

For all his talk of Heaven, Dickens was careful to note the rewards in this life to be had from decency, kindness, cheerfulness, harmlessness.  As a satirist and sermonizer, he was particularly ruthless with hypocrites and gave us, in characters like Uriah Heep and Mr. Pecksniff among the most devastating, and funny portraits of the type in all of western literature.  It is worth noting though that all such satires in Dickens are balanced by the good; for the awfulness of the "'umble person" of Uriah Heep, there is the genuinely humble virtues of Ham Peggotty, and Mr. Mell, for every Pecksniff, a Tom Pinch.  (These latter examples are of course the very characters dismissed by some critics as "sentimental" and unrealistic; a charge that to my mind always suggests the narrowness of the critic's acquaintance more than the shallowness of Dickens' observation or emotion.  Anyone who hasn't met a Tom Pinch can't, I think really appreciate the satire in a Pecksniff, suggesting further that the critic may be nearer the Pecksniff himself than not.)  If the poor schoolmaster, Mr. Mells, is made to suffer by public disclosure of  supporting his old mother in the workhouse, and then rescued by Dickens and sent to become a headmaster, "Dr. Mells", in Australia, this seems to me a forgivable example of Dickens affection for his characters rather than any failure to draw them.

Indeed, if Dickens, as every comic novelist before him, did believe himself in part at least obliged to instruct his reader in the rewards of virtue as well as to punish vice, he had no illusion as to the unequal fate of the individual in even his creation.  The blameless sometime die too soon, the good may go unrewarded, or unnoticed, the narrow and the ignorant might avoid enlightenment, let alone their just desserts and die in their beds.

And yet, "to increase the stock of harmless cheerfulness" seems to me admirable on still other grounds than in observing the conventions of the English comic novel and satisfying the reader's sentimental hope of a happy ending.  Dickens believed absolutely in the contribution of "harmless cheerfulness" to the common good.  He believed in the good that might come from a small kindness, from honesty and honest work, from sociability, from laughter.  He believed in the nobility of spirit that might be exampled by the humblest souls, in the most modest way, no matter their circumstances.  He saw this everywhere around him, just as he saw the desperation, injustice and dirt.  He listened for it as closely and reproduced it as faithfully as he did the odd or amusing expression or the characteristic phrase.  He had an ear for kindness.

It is in this notice taken that I am reminded of Dickens today, and feel some obligation to do likewise.  

Montaigne writes:

“To compose our character is our duty, not to compose books, and to win, not battles and provinces, but order and tranquility in our conduct. Our great and glorious masterpiece is to live appropriately. All other things, ruling, hoarding, building, are only little appendages and props, at most.” 

Again, someone's said it better than I can.  If Dickens has taught me the importance of making note, Montaigne explains the example.

A former coworker of mine, Julie Roth, died on January 6th of this year.  She retired in 2010, after working twenty three years in Payroll and Accounts Payable at the bookstore.  I did not know her well or work with her in the office.  Nevertheless, to me she was a glad presence; I never passed her in a hallway that she didn't give me a smile, never spoke to her that I wasn't made to feel the better for her time.  She laughed easily and often.  She preferred pretty colors and dressed, often as not in light violets and greens, in bright blues, and in sunny shades that matched her beaming grin.  From those who knew her better and worked more closely with her, I know that she did her work well and faithfully and without fuss.  Shy she might have been, but she was a friend to everyone who knew her, and a help to any that asked.  From the official notice of her passing, I learn that she travelled extensively and that she sang enthusiastically with the Sweet Adelines.  Just today, from the younger woman who worked at the desk next to hers until Julie retired, I had the following description,

"She sparkled."

So she did. 

She came with a friend to hear me read more than once and to catch sight of her smile or hear her light laugh among others gave me courage and the deepest satisfaction.  Even after she had retired and faced the sad recurrence of the grave illness she'd survived at least once before, I never saw her but she laughed and smiled and said not one word to me of her struggles.

Anyone who has ever worked in a big bookstore like the one where I work now, or anywhere requiring the kind of work she did, will have met someone like her; some quiet soul, hard working and honest, with none but good intentions and the natural disposition to enjoy the world, whatever, good and bad might be in it.  On such bright spirits and humble people does the work of the world, and the pleasure we might take in the doing of it, depend.

Obviously, others knew her better: the women she worked with, the ones with whom she sang and travelled, but I may presume to remember her here, and to mark her untimely passing at least insofar as to note that with her has passed out of this world some measure of the "harmless cheerfulness" the world will always need.

Think for just a minute then about the first of those two words, "harmless" and what that means.  Her cheerfulness is easy enough to see in just the photograph above, but that other word is too often and exclusively assumed to be a term of condescension.  I mean it in no such sense, but rather as Dickens employed it, I think.  Imagine what it might mean to have actually done no harm, to be remembered, when we die, as having never given an intentional hurt, to be remembered, so far as I can tell, with a universal affection and respect and to have made people happier for having had, however briefly your acquaintance.  Think of that!

Think what it might mean to be remembered for the "order and tranquility" of one's character, for the constancy of one's friendship, for the respect and affection of even the people one may have known only in passing.  Think of that.

There will be other, better tributes yet to come from those who, as I say, knew her longer and better.  For me, I can think of nothing more to say than that I will miss her smile.  Would that I might be remembered so well and with so happy a thought.

Another Day at the Doodle Factory: Sales Division.

Please note, I did not write the staff recommendations.  (True, a friend did, but I didn't and that's what matters.)

Pictures from an Exhibition

Photos by Joe Garvin, bless 'im.

Pass It On... (A Holiday Video in which I Briefly Figure)

Making Little Memorials

The boss was a great enthusiast of the new.  He loved a fresh coat of paint.  He loved hanging out and watching the lines in the Tech Center on "new release" days.  "Innovation" was on his list of favorite words.  He was, I suspect, the prime mover in getting us an Espresso  Book Machine.  (Though, to claim my due, I'm the one who named it Homer, after Homer Price and his donut machine, rather than the the greatest Greek poet.)  Anyway, it seemed entirely appropriate then to use the EBM to pay a small tribute to Bryan Pearce, so we did.

Some people asked me to print them copies of the piece I'd written when I learned of Bryan's death, so I did.  The unfortunate thing about printing things from this blog is that the formatting doesn't lend itself to the page.  That gave me the idea of making it a little EBM book instead.  I went to the extraordinary Anna Micklin, who operates the machine and runs our design and publishing.  She got it immediately.  Then, I went to see Lester Groom who produces our in-store news-letter, and among other things, takes so many wonderful pictures at store events.  He gave Anna a disc, and she made the handsome object pictured here.

(When I tried to pay for the cost of making this thing, Mark Mouser, my Department boss, wouldn't let me.  He did it, I'm pretty sure, being that kind of guy himself.)

I was glad to see Bryan's wife in the store last week, and glad of the opportunity to thank her for the memorial service.  I was glad as well to finally be able to give her copies of our little memorial book, produced entirely by University Book Store staff, on Bryan's Espresso Book Machine.  She accepted a copy for herself, and one for each of their girls.

I hope it will make them smile.  I'm pretty sure it would have made Bryan smile -- but then, he smiled all the time.

In Memoriam

A few years ago I spoke at a friend's memorial service.  She was a coworker, a remarkable little woman, full of dark humor and fellow-feeling, a friend.  She was a spitfire named Jennifer Kuhn, and we all loved her.  I miss her still.  She had asked me to speak at her memorial and so I did, as did many others.  (She would have been glad, I like to think, to have seen such a crowd.)

After her memorial, our boss, the CEO of the company, a young man, then in rude good health, joking or not, asked me the same thing. "You have to promise to do that for me," he said, "if I die I want you to do the eulogy."  Other people said similar things to me that day.  Having lived in San Francisco in the Eighties, I have some experience of speaking at funerals.  It isn't something about which to brag, but people are kind, and one wants to say something after, I know.  I may have said it to someone myself.

When Bryan Pearce said it to me, I'm pretty sure it was a joke, or if it was sincere, I don't expect he would have remembered saying it, or thought much of saying it after.  As I've said, our boss was still a young man, and when he died recently, after an impossibly difficult illness that lasted nearly a year to the day from his original cancer diagnosis, it was not only a blow to us all, and a shock, but also frankly difficult to accept.  Death leaves a kind of chaos in it's wake, always.

I've just been to Bryan's memorial service.  He was an important figure in our industry.  His service was well attended.  A number of people spoke; colleagues with whom he worked closely, personal friends, and most movingly his wife and daughters.

I'm glad I went.  I did not know the man as they did, obviously.  I had some sense of who he was beyond our roles as employer and employee, though that had more to do with his friendly and generous nature than with any presumption on my part.  Bryan would have everyone a friend.

It is perhaps presumptuous of me now to say anything more in his memory.  I've already written something here to mark his passing.  Still, today I remember the promise I made him years ago and joking or not, I've kept it.

It wasn't my place to say anything at his service.  So I'll just say it here, that these few words might have some small comfort to those of us who miss him.  I can't think what else to do.

A poet* said, "I remember from your life," and that's right, it seems to me, that's just how it happens.  When someone dies, but even before that happens, we can never have the whole life of another person.  When someone dies, that is what we lose.  Some of us will have had more of him than others; those that knew him best, that loved him and were loved by him, they will have the most, and that's right, that that should be so.  The people he loved best, the woman he loved, the children they made, they will remember him best, they will have memories we won't.  They will need more.  They've lost more.

Those of us who worked most closely with him, those with whom he worked every day and for years, they will remember differently, but still, they will remember too.  They will remember what he did, all he tried to do, and why, and why it matters, still.  

The rest of us will remember from his life just as much as is ours; what we learned from his example, what he gave and taught us, what we owe him, the man he was when he was with us, all too briefly.

Even in the aggregate, our memories from his life, can not be what it means to be alive, to have him still here, with us, and that is why his loss is felt so, and will be.   That is what we mourn, what we can not have again.

Another poet, a very different poet, said:

Can I see another's woe,

And not be in sorrow too?

Can I see another's grief,

And not seek for kind relief?

That is why we come here today, seeking that "kind relief."  That is what the memories we have from his life, the memories we each have, large and small, together, we offer one another now.  It is what we do.  It is all we can do for one another now, just now.  William Blake, a great poet, wrote the lines I just read.  In that same poem, called "On Another's Sorrow," he also says:

Can I see a falling tear,

And not feel my sorrow's share?

My share is small, but it is mine.  My memories: of Bryan smiling in the morning from across the bookstore's lobby, of Bryan laughing at something I said to make him laugh when perhaps he ought not to have, my memories of his many kindnesses, his enthusiasm, his integrity, his decency, his sense, his example, these are mine.  That is my loss; my kind boss, the boss who danced with me, and laughed, and did good.  That is "my sorrow's share".  

It is, as I've said, a small thing.  I offer it today to those for whom this loss is irreparable.  Not that it can mean so much to them, as it does to me, but that, with all the others gathered here today, we may remember, together, as much as we can, today, so that we may remember today -- our losses, and his gifts -- as long as we live.

He was a good man.  Remember that.  It matters.  It matters more than he knew.  What he did, the good he did, matters.  That he was good, that he was a good man, that matters more.  Remember that even I, who only worked for him, someone who never knew him as you did, someone who by all rights he should not have liked, but weirdly, miraculously, eventually he did, remember that even I knew that.  He was a good man.  There are too few.  

That is what I will remember from him.  He was a good man.  I will miss him.

*Owen Dodson, "Poems for My Brother Kenneth"

The Good Life

The distance between the good life and a good life may be no more more than a change of article.  The good life is the preoccupation of moral philosophers and the people who advertise beer.  The latter is a phrase usually reserved to obsequies.  I've neither the qualifications nor the occasion to review or dispute the philosophers, and now is not the moment to critique the vulgar usage of the advertisers.  I  would however argue, if just from instinct, that as near as we can come to the good, most of us, myself included, is by example.  Bryan Pearce was a good man.  He died Friday.   

He was my boss at the University Book Store.  He was also of course a husband and a father, the CEO of the company, a force in both the business of independent and college bookstores, a devoted graduate and supporter of the University of Washington.  I'll let other speak to all that.  Bryan's was a life and a career that effected more people, I suspect, than he knew.  I came to know him at work.

Even that seems to imply a greater intimacy to our relationship than there may actually have been, for which I'm afraid I'd have to blame Bryan.  He was a gentleman.  He invariably said, even of someone as remote from his position in the company as me, that we "worked together."  He also used the word "team" in contexts outside of organized sports. When we met and for some time thereafter I was, I confess, suspicious of such inclusive language, which to my old ears, tuned to the somewhat cynical sounds of socialism and class-divisions, smacked of the School of Business and an MBA.  Likewise "family," another word of which Bryan was fond, when used in reference to employer and employees, in my previous experience was more usually deployed as a rhetorical device preceding the announcement of some unpleasant or exploitative change in either benefits or hours or both.  Bryan's sincerity was new to me in a man in his position, at least when addressing a man in mine.

Our very first conversation of more than a few words was indicative of this misunderstanding.  I hadn't been working for him very long when the decision was taken somewhere well off the sales floor to stop calling people like me "clerks."  I learned about this from a recorded message on the store's phones -- we used to have advertisements and announce forthcoming events intermittently while the "hold" music played.  Calling back and forth every day between the branches of the bookstore to arrange book transfers and the like, I heard those messages a lot.  (Selfishly then, I am not sorry they're gone.)  One day the message included the injunction to, "just ask one of our sales associates if you have any questions!"  (All those messages came with exclamation marks.)  In my opinion, there have been few developments in contemporary management culture more tin-eared than this practice of calling clerks, "sales associates."  "Clerk" is a word nearly as venerable as the language.  "Bookseller" is a good one too, even better as it more exactly describes what it is I do (hopefully) every working day.  I do not, even on my worst day, "associate" with sales.  The idea is to make sales, not sidle up to them at a party.  I understand the urge to flatter relatively low paid workers by giving us airs rather than raises, but I've neither a law degree nor any need of being made to feel better in this way about selling books.  I like what I do.

All of which arguments I eventually made to my immediate supervisor after listening to that damned phone-message for the hundredth time.  She, quite rightly if discouragingly suggested I take the matter up with the boss.  Now, as I've said, heretofore we had exchanged no more than an introduction and the usual morning pleasantries.  Still, I had what someone's grandmother would probably have described as "a bee in my bonnet," so off I went to the third floor offices.  Bryan's door was always open.  (It really nearly always was.)  In I went.

Looking back, I imagine myself intruding into Bryan's office for the first time in something like the character of Pappy Yokum.  For any not old enough to remember the comic strip Lil' Abner, Pappy was his short and short-tempered father, notorious for jumping up and down in a state usually described as being "hoppin' mad." I'm sure I looked a little mad indeed.  Bryan smiled.  He did that nearly all the time.  Without much more than a by-your-leave, I'm pretty sure I launched into the same arguments against the phrase "sales associates" made above, though not so concisely as this and with, I do not doubt, an unseemly passion for an unscheduled business meeting.  Bryan listened.  He did that.  On and on I went.  I remember describing that idiotic phrase, "sales associate" as both meaningless and "an abuse of the language."  I specifically remember that rather windy pomposity as something like my last word on the subject.  As I've said, I talked, Bryan listened.  He did that.  He may have asked me a question or two.  He did that too.  I can't remember.  I do remember that at some point he stopped smiling.  Instead, he leaned in.  His expression quickly changed to one of calm concern.  His interest I eventually came to recognize as genuine, though at the time I remember something like panic coming over me at the intensity of his gaze.  I may have mistaken his sympathy for something else.  He proved to be a most sympathetic character over the years.  I hadn't the experience yet or the simple common sense to see this at the time.  When I finally ran out of gas, he acknowledged my obvious discomposure and thanked me for bringing my concerns to his attention.  (He may have used the word "feedback."  The man did talk that way.)  I left feeling I'd done nothing much but proved myself a perfect ass.

Then the phone-message changed.  it wasn't immediate, but it did change.  That it changed was not due to my ranting, but was instead entirely the result of the management of Bryan Pearce.  He listened.  Even to me he listened.  More importantly, he actually sought out the opinions of the people most immediately effected by this and nearly every other decision, major or minor that he made, invariably in the hope of making the bookstore a better place.

It's a trivial anecdote, hardly worth recording.  It does however suggest something not only of our relationship but of the man's remarkable patience and complete sincerity.  I can not emphasize how much I came to rely on the first and trust the second.  Bryan invariably meant what he said.  That is a rare thing in my experience of bosses, and of men, come to that.  When he asked for my opinion, he meant it. Though I can't but think he must have regretted the question more than once, he never stopped asking.  When he said he shared my concerns, he did.  When he said he would follow up on something, he did.

If that had proved to be the whole of my experience with him, he would still have had my respect and I would still have cause to regret his untimely retirement, and now his passing.  He proved to be a most unlikely and powerful ally in every small effort or initiative I made to improve either my job or the bookstore.  His backing of the idea, and management of the practicalities involved, is the reason we sell used trade books.  He was a very real collaborator, not just another man at a meeting.  He made a point of introducing me at the used books desk to nearly every visitor he ever brought to the sales floor.  He asked me to appear on a panel on selling used books at a conference of college bookstores.  He encouraged me to write about my love of old books as well as new.  He laughed at the affectionate caricature I drew of him as a gift, and touchingly, asked if he could keep it.  He came to hear the very first reading I ever gave in the bookstore.  I'll always be grateful to him as much for his enthusiasm as his patience.

His enthusiasm for the bookstore, and his genuine belief in the company's mission; to serve the students, faculty and staff of the University, was truly a wonderful thing to see.  The was no better advocate for the bookstore to the campus and no one more devoted to meeting the needs of the University's students.  It was quite obvious he loved his job.  He loved the place.  He loved the school.  Even in difficult times for college bookstores, he loved coming to work and believed in what we do.

When a friend and coworker died some years ago, we had a memorial service after hours at the bookstore.  Bryan of course spoke.  I did too.  I'd never seen the man cry before.  I was moved to see him so moved.

When we started having our annual employee banquet at the bookstore a few years ago, somebody -- it may have been Bryan for all I know -- decided to hire a DJ for the party.  Bryan loved that event, and clearly looked forward to it every year.  He handed out awards and door prizes.  He worked the room and talked to everybody.  He was clearly very much in his element;  telling everyone how wonderful we all were, what wonderful work we all did together, what a special place we were privileged to occupy in service to a great University.  He meant every word.  The first year we had the DJ at the party, it seemed as though no one was going to dance.  Everyone sat at the tables and smiled as awkwardly as teenagers at their first formal.  Finally a coworker claimed the floor with a rather freely interpreted twist.  I joined her. Eventually a lot more people turned out.  At some point I spotted Bryan, grinning at the information desk, not dancing.  We dragged him onto the floor.  He was a very good sport indeed.

At last year's banquet, which sadly proved to be his last, he was already quit ill.  He had to sit on the grand staircase and let others distribute the prizes after awhile.  Nothing, however, would have kept him from at least sitting there, smiling.

I've worked for a lot of men.  There haven't been too many of them who danced with me.

In just the last year or so, when it became increasingly obvious that he was ill, I would watch him in the mornings when he would come down to the sales floor alone.  He would often just walk about the place, smiling.  The last time I saw him, it was quite early one morning after he'd already announced his early retirement.  I don't know that he saw me at my desk.  Traffic had been unexpectedly light that morning.  I'd gotten in very early.  I sat and watched him for some minutes.  He simply stood in the middle of the lobby, looking.  It was inexpressibly sad.  The place was his life's work.  He'd done well. Clearly, he was saying goodbye.  I didn't want to intrude.

Later that same morning, I saw him briefly once more, on his way out.  This time I caught his eye.  We smiled.  Neither of us spoke.  Neither of us waved.

When I learned of his death, I immediately regretted that last, lost opportunity to say goodbye.  Now I don't.  I will remember him, always, smiling.

He was a good man.  He was an excellent boss.  I'm flattered when I remember that he introduced me to strangers more than once as his friend.  I know he was one to me, as unlikely as that may have seemed when we met.  I respected and admired him.  He was universally acknowledged to have been a leader in his field.  He was a lovely man.  He was clearly loved.  I will miss him.

What is the good life then?  What does it mean to say, as we so often do at funerals that a person had a good life?  All I know is that we have lost a good man, an example of what it means to be decent, honest, kind.  We need such people.  They make us better for having known them.  They make us smile.

I'll always remember him, dancing.

Rest in peace, boss.  You did good.

Poor Recompense

"With regard to the sharpest and most melting sorrow, that which arises from the loss of those whom we have loved with tenderness, it may be observed, that friendship between mortals can be contracted on no other terms than that one must some time mourn for the other's death: and this grief will always yield to the survivor one consolation proportionate to his affliction; for the pain, whatever it be, the he himself feels, his friend has escaped."
Johnson: Rambler #17 (May 15, 1750) *

It's not such a strange thing, is it, that even in our grief that those of us that live and work in books should turn to books for comfort?  Where better?  At such times, friends and family know only what we know of our losses, more or less, if that and we can not ask them to say what we can not, not yet, anyway.  Those conversations, however necessary to us, we have just among ourselves.  If the loss is not so much a private grief as a more general misfortune there is all the more reason to turn for the articulation of it to those whose griefs have been memorialized in language which has survived both the loss and the speaker, no?

 "When a friend is carried to his grave, we at once find excuses for every weakness, and palliations of every fault; we recollect a thousand endearments which before glided off our minds without impression, a thousand favors unrepaid, a thousand duties unperformed, and wish, vainly wish for his return, not so much that we may receive, as that we may bestow happiness, and recompense that kindness which before we never understood."
Johnson: Rambler #54 (September 22, 1750)

We count too many losses lately, or so at least it seems tonight.  The truth is of course that death is ever present.  We can not allow for that fact without contemplation of the corollary; that life goes on even in the midst of seemingly irreparable loss.  Again, as Johnson said to Boswell, "If one was to think constantly of death, the business of life would stand still."  We go on.

 "To be always afraid of losing life is, indeed, scarcely to enjoy a life that can deserve the care of preservation. He that once indulges idle fears will never be at rest. Our present state admits only of a kind of negative security; we must conclude ourselves safe when we see no danger, or none inadequate to our powers of opposition. Death, indeed, continually hovers about us, but hovers commonly unseen, unless we sharpen our sight by useless curiosity."
Johnson: Rambler #126 (June 1, 1751)

Johnson addressed the subject regularly, both publicly and privately.  In his essays, in his poetry, his conversation, his letters, his prayers.  We are uniquely fortunate in having so much still to hand of what the great man said, on every occasion and condition of a man's life, from birth to death.  If generally the reader turns to him more often to be entertained by his conversation and charmed by his company, and to be educated as much in morals as in literature, the Doctor is nonetheless, I find, a great guide and solace in his more somber reflections.

 "We, to whom the shortness of life has given frequent occasions of contemplating mortality, can, without emotion, see generations of men pass away, and are at leisure to establish modes of sorrow and adjust the ceremonial of death. We can look upon funeral pomp as a common spectacle, in which we have no concern, and turn away from it to trifles and amusements, without dejection of look or inquietude of heart."
Johnson: Rambler #78 (December 15, 1750)


He knew whereof he spoke.  When his mother died, he hadn't the money to bury her.  (He wrote his one novel, The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia, originally titled, 'The Choice of Life", in a week, to pay for her funeral.)  His beloved wife, Tetty, died without seeing his success and the fame his Dictionary brought him.  Johnson told many friends, including his greatest biographer -- the greatest who ever lived -- James Boswell, that after her death "I have ever since seemed to myself broken off from mankind; a solitary wander in the wild of life, without any direction, or fixed point of view: a gloomy gazer on the world to which I have little relation."  Every year, for the rest of his life, on her birthday, on their anniversary and the anniversary of her death, he would mark the day with prayers of gratitude and overwhelming sadness. This, briefly, from 1782:

 "This is the day on which in 1752 dear Tetty died. I have now uttered a prayer of repentance and c.; perhaps Tetty knows that I prayed for her. Perhaps Tetty is now praying for me. God help me. Thou, God, art merciful, hear my prayers, and enable me to trust in Thee.
We were married almost seventeen years, and have now been parted thirty."

 When I learned of the untimely death of a coworker today, it seemed to me that everything I was already reading lost it's savour.  Without even thinking what I was doing or why, I wandered my shelves looking, although I did not know it, for the consolation of an old friend, and found Samuel Johnson.  I picked up his essays from The Idler, and read:

"The loss of a friend upon whom the heart was fixed, to whom every wish and endeavour was tended, is a state of dreary desolation, in which the mind looks abroad impatient of itself, and finds nothing but emptiness and horror. The blameless life, the artless tenderness, the pious simplicity, the modest resignation, the patient sickness, and the quiet death, are remembered only to add value to the loss, to aggravate regret for what cannot be amended, to deepen sorrow for what cannot be recalled."
Johnson: Idler #41 (January 27, 1759)

I kept reading well into the night.  When Johnson neared the end of his own life, Boswell tells us, his deepest regret came when he could himself no longer read "during his hours of restlessness.  'I used formerly, (he added,) when sleepless in bed, to read like a Turk.'"

 Among the last prayers he offered at the end, were the words, "Bless my friends, have mercy upon all men."

I offer the simple words here, as a first memorial to my friend, comfort to his family and a most fervent blessing on Johnson's memory and a hope for us all.

*I am grateful for most of these quotes to the rather appallingly named, but extremely good site, The Samuel Johnson Sound Bite Page.