Thoreau just set down what was happening in his life day by day. His NOW. So I named this, SLICES OF NOW to emulate what he did in real time.

Also to answer the question older women get asked all the time: ‘What on earth do you find to DO all day?” – in that phoney, patronizing, talk-down voice used exclusively for the elderly as though, rather than upright and dressed, anyone over 65 should be propped up in a nursing home bed somewhere drinking through a straw. They invented that ghastly word, ‘fiesty’ for those of us who aren’t.

Thoreau and I turn out to have much the same topics, go figure. Both of us write seasonally about nature and our gardens, what we’re reading, the passersby or the neighbours (and there’s LOTS about them I haven’t said) or philosophers that get it, or what we’re writing or trying to understand well enough to write about with a smattering of politics that we can have a say in. He wasn’t consciously trying to influence the world’s leaders – but he did.

Louisa May Alcott said he had a ‘neck beard’ that served as a good barrier to keep the women away. I illustrate what that looked like by the one on the man in my life which most emphastically does not keep me away.

He wrote – I write about the current slice of our NOW. In this century I’ve added in the influences with which technology gifts us, often wondering what he would’ve made of them: Mine are often comic strips reflecting on popular culture, a large part of which is facebook and designer coffees that cost more than he spent in a week on groceries. I don’t wish to travel any more than he did, neither of us out of fear but indifference.

Often I feel him looking over my shoulder and nodding. Both of us wander into politics now and then but only the stuff we think we might be able to do something about. We both write poetry and I think he probably wrote songs too but there isn’t any evidence. Anyone tends to sing when they’re by themselves. Both of us continually strive for simplicity. Hence my free table, loaded with books.

I’m going to try and link to some of his on-line journals.

When something awful happens to you online, the great thing is it has happened to many others before you. You haven’t been singled out. There’s help out there because one big thing about the net is that people are generous from all sorts of motives, true, but they share such things regularly.

I didn’t write yesterday, hoping to solve the message I got from my server here: “Fatal Error. Out Of Memory!” Wouldn’t let me download anything to this blog. However, the following day, things were inexplicably fine as you can see, thank heavens.

However it was a hot day and other troubles erupted. Got 3 ink cartridges shipped extra-speedy online and they were the wrong ones.

Then 199 people applied to friend me on Facebook. (!) I friended one.

I also wore the pink spray painted dollar store hat with the big rose to an important do and everybody treated it as though it was expensive. I felt like someone fancy who had it in her to dispense largresse (as the books say, whatever that is – sounds like somethng you bake with tomato sauce).

Finally that bathng suit from Junonia STILL hasn’t come and the old one is falling directly off my body when I swim. If these are all my troubles and joys, I’m doing okay today, eh?

But this DID mean online purchases somewhere in transit: Bathing Suit & Vacuum Filters since the cartridges DID come (just the wrong sort, quickly sorted by the Great 123 Cartridge Company. I have ordered online ever since the net was set up and nobody has ever stolen my identity or made a false move in that direction.

Online ordering has been reliable, speedy in most cases, human and with great choice options. I am about to order a replica human brain with every confidence.

Yesterday I went to an Arts & Crafts store called Michaels. Wanted everything in the place. Spools of ribbon shelved according to colour, lots of it patterned, a bin of discards, lace, silk flowers, a whole BRIDES section with glowering young women stomping about comparing miniscule scraps of things in their hands – made me realize that the clerk’s extreme niceness must have something to do with all the bridezillas undoubtedly harrassers of the first order and returning items with snarls.

Bought silk flowers for 4 dollar store hats. Was wearing the blue & white one and curiously got a lot of respect, simply because of the hat, I decided later. And this was before I even trimmed it. Wearing it again today with blue India cloth dress from back room of the small Sally Ann which is cool in today’s humidity. Got lots of comments on it yesterday at the pool, untrimmed.

My upstairs tenant stuck her head out of the window as I was going to the car and yelled, ” Whatta GREAT hat!” Thanks. I thought so too. Someone in the locker room said, “She probably got that hat at the crafts fair on the weekend.” Those hats start at fifty bucks. I started warbling the delights of Dollarama. And yes, I AM against sweatshops and cheap imports BUT since they are nearly impossible to avoid, i try to be active politically to protest and not send the guilt meter ticking any higher. At least I DO do something when I can.

Back to the hats. The painted pink seems a crowning glory even though I had to stitch it back together after the second wash. Such delight comes from these small things. I also went to Canadian Tire for more glue for the renku and replaced my microwave and bought two fans, one of which is whirrying into the windowless bathroom with great success.

Tuesday is errand day and it went well.

          In this scenario, all the fixtures have been restored to new, including oblong wooden tables with rounded edges so you don’t keep bumping your hips, chairs around, for talk and laying out plans yet plenty of room for people to go round without disturbance.

          All textbooks as always are a buck. Even if they’re brand-new.

         Poetry is posted thoughtfully and not at random.

          There are lots of places to individually display great old books, cover facing out, both hardcover & paperback, large & small with haunting faces, great graphics, some from the thirties & forties, boxes & boxes of emphera to be tenderly  considered, each single shining piece that had been worth saving to someone, all the years.

          And nobody grabs these one-of-a-kind treasures off and whisks them away at their low prices to keep them out of the public eye, for themselves. They just enjoy them, like you would a gallery, browsing & replacing. The thing was, you see, there isnt any GREED!  The whole place is so pleasurable.

          The best part, though is contending with ideas, as there always was in my bookselling years. The floating of theories, thoughts, surmises, the putting together of one thing with another. As I do on line now, and sitting down with my husband, Dick on Saturdays to make sense of the week we have just lived. Reading bits of things we’ve written to each other and the world, editing what we’ve been working on, making one big glorious whole of those little incidents and comments that happened on the run.

          Just before I woke up, there was this lovely slender  blonde wearing velvet and a hand-painted silk scarf, buying several battered old books made from oilcloth with handpainted covers featuring dancers. The books were limp and handbound and distinctive. The drawings inside promised to be unforgettable. She delved in her purse while the cashier was ringing up someone ahead and she & I chatted. Then she came up with two foil-covered chocolate coins, a gum wrapper and a few pennies.

          ‘Oh dear,” she was saying amused in a musical voice not all that worried.

          I waved my hand grandly and said,” take them. We can work it out. Just make a deliberate effort to tell all your friends about why this place is the way it is. I’m a socialist, you see. Text books have to be a dollar. We can pay maybe a quarter each, so you have to be willing to let them go for that. Bring along too the art, texts, cards and drawings you’ve saved with and in them and now you need to find a home for.”

          “Oh yes,” she said, standing up on her dancer’s toes and pirouetting. “We need a place like this. Thank goodness you’re back!” and she took the books and went away with a covey of friends, all talking about the Italian Rennaissance.

          I strolled across the vast width of the shop, shelves to the ceiling, wide aisles with room for groups to chat, and talk was happening everywhere. I started to unpack a box of books from the thirties and here was a Freddy The Pig Meets The Big Bad Wolf, a book I’d never known existed, (and I’ve read ALL the Freddy’s)  worn and fragile, published in Newfoundland Scotia during the Great Depression, with old drawings before the regular artist had begun.

          Beneath it were similar treasures, saved by individuals through the years, all small books, some handmade, like the greatest of book fairs, the very best of an old year’s published creations, everyone something you’d waited your whole life for – and NO ONE grabbed at them or pushed or shoved or offered to buy the whole box and take it away so no one else would ever know what it contained.

          Everyone was happy to let me display these wonderful evidences of art & life & thought in this great place.

          Boxes like this actually used to come in now and then. Books you wanted to think existed but never knew for certain. It was rare but it happened. This is one of the addictive qualities of bookselling. What will come through the door next.

          None of the usual problems existed in this shop. Not rent and property tax increases,  bank-be-dazzled booksellers  stalking your shelves to siphon off anything unusual or unique or special at wholesale prices, special reserve sales where only the cognoscenti are allowed in, dropping great sums of money while sneering at those innocents who love a work for the words inside or the art on the cover.

          But in these vast and delightful premises, none of that goes on. All the people contending with ideas were sharing & spending time with whoever wanted to come.

          Dick & I & our kids lived somewhere upstairs from this vast place and only come in now and then at a convenient hour, to see how things are going. We have a great, knowledgeable staff working only the hours that are best for them, using the remaining time to write or dance, or paint or sing. When they’ve been up late with gigs, they don’t have to come in till they’re rested and they’re always free to talk about books in their area. All that energy and joy from their creative work permeates this book place but there aren’t any prima donnas.

          There’s a university nearby, in fact, several. A school of art and one of dance in an old quarter of town where no one is forced to keep up suburban standards so old buildings can be what they’ve always been.

    Outside there are cafes and diners that don’t cost much and everyone has enough money to buy what they need with time enough to enjoy it.  The few cars required for disabled folks like us, go slow and are open so the people inside can talk to those lounging on the sidewalks and in the cafes.

          Lots of bicycles, also going slow, not hurrying off on some deadline. The ogre, time, seems to have been routed for good. He nips at no heels that I can see.

          I’ve been in this bookshop before when I sleep. It combines parts of my shop with the shop I ran in Toronto, shops I have loved all over Canada and the U.S. visited and read about; the one’s in Paris and Wales and England that I only know from pictures, the one in Seattle my father loved, the one that Western Writer, Larry McMurtry runs out in the desert, Christopher Morley’s haunted bookshop, others that never existed but ought to have,.

           I’m gradually coming to believe that part of your work here and now is customizing your afterlife. So this shop full of ideas is mine, a place where those with years of knowledge, wisdom and experience; the Einsteins and Pavlovas and Picassos are at peace and ready to share with those who are just beginning to love and understand what they offer. You can sit and listen and talk and be heard and there’s time enough for it all, surrounded by the record in books of the world’s ideas.

          In my life I have experienced such joys as this when the commercial part has fallen away and only the genuine pleasure remains from physical contact with the ideas connected with art, dance, music, writing. Booksellers talking frankly, late at night,  men and women who were truly of ideas, sharing them freely in an impromptu session, back in the stacks, like Al Purdy and Maeshel Teitelbaum, Dennis Lee and Northrup Fry, along with composers & artists, coming in as they were want to do in my shop in Toronto,  finding copies of their own works to make their points.

          Which has always been the reason for such shops to exist, to make a place where ideas can happen, as they will, as the universe directs. Only money, space, greed and the capitalistic spirit prevent it now.

         It seems to me if we customize the joys we’ve experienced here, (which for me has been the power of ideas, truth-sharing and passion), we’ll have a headstart on what we need from the afterlife. Certainly it will have to be based on truth, which means the idea of being richer than someone else or having dozens of virgins with whom you have your wicked way, aren’t going to be possible.

    After, and because of, the bookshop, I’ve got some other great afterlives to sample. There’s one where I’m a history major and read all those books I haven’t been able to work in yet, another where I get to sculpt great statues from stone or bronze and mold plastics.

    There’s another designing liveable houses from the kinds of materials you’d like to spend your life with, lots of green space around them, no boxes surrounded by parking lots. Or inventing a new kind of life for feral pets.  Or building aviaries and flying around with them after.

     I don’t intend to be caught flat-footed with no options when the door to that next life opens up as it does. Nope. My dreams are pretty specific and I’m ready to try on the next one anytime.

          I said something like this to a young man from McGill who came in to film my shop shortly after Christmas, 1997, just before it died. All my theories, ideas, hopes and dreams, and the books on my shelves, singing to him, each to each. There was one on urban trees and another on London rivers that I think of often.  And Leo Rosten’s Yiddish Dictionary which I held in my hands for a brief moment.

     Perhaps I shall hold them again.