When I woke up this morning about 4:30, I was repeating a dream I’d just had. I went ahead and polished up what it was I was working on, repeating it to whoever I swam with down at the pool. This piece is the result:
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(Unless you want to end up with a generic one-size-fits-all, pay attention)
CUSTOMIZE YOUR AFTERLIFE
Just woke up from a repetitive dream of running the perfect bookshop. It has all the elements of the small out of print shop I ran at the end of the seventies, eighties and most of the nineties, except much larger.
A generic afterlife is not for me. No wings, halos, gold streets nor any of the various versions of which I’ve heard. We’ve all tasted what the real thing could be, however briefly, at some time or other. It comes out of a sharing community, replete with ideas and hope, passionate accounts of experience, contacts with greatness. Truth runs through it all with an enduring vision of the possible.
Based on our lives, my husband, Dick’s afterlife is built around golf courses, mine around an old bookshop the way so much of my life has been lived.
It’s a huge warehouse, (nothing whatsoever like Chapters), with lots of skylights in the twenty foot ceilings, nooks and crannies and sturdy pillars holding up a brand-new roof that never leaks.
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.