What a great find. After being oh-so-disciplined spending the entire weekend finishing up my absolute least favorite task as a self-employed business-owner, being TAXES, I got to spend some free time with wonderful hubby on tuesday.
He had a day off from work and it being a weekday made it so great. No traffic, no hassles, no work. we started the day filming Daniel at school working on a new painting. I needed to take some still photos for a promo piece for his senior show, and Bryan shot video for the planet, and for... well just having some video of Daniel doing what he does.
After that we headed off to the little "pickle diner" for breakfast and some undefined time. I say undefined because so much of our time lands under defined categories, or obligation. And we are not always the best at setting aside this necessary kind of time for ourselves. Undefined time is characterized by a string of unplanned activities and can be very refreshing when things go well. It can also be horrible if the expectation is to have a wonderful time and something goes wrong. Today was not that day. After breakfast we had no set plans and so we wandered into a store with a huge sign on the front that advertised "Bookstore going out of business", or some such thing. Big yellow and red sign that implies that anything in the store is probably not worth having, but we wandered in anyway. What the heck, it's undefined time.
If you had been paying attention you may have heard the sucking sound when we walked through the big glass doors. The vacuum effect of both bryan and I being drawn to stacks and stacks of books. We unconsciously wandered apart, zombie-like, toward the various book categories. Signs were placed atop all the tables proclaiming...
ALL Paperbacks $1.00
ALL Hardbacks $2.00
Sheer joy. For a family who spends more on Amazon then on anything else this was a slice of heaven. And the titles weren't all reject leftovers like I expected. I scooped up a number of useful business books right off the bat. Bryan discovered three copies of "Letters to a Young Artist" by Julia Cameron. I found a lone copy of "Cluetrain Manifesto" which I had wanted to replace after someone had borrowed our copy and we couldn't recall who. I was standing in an aisle with a stack of books in my hand, totally engrossed when Bryan brushed by me,
"Ill go get a cart".
This was one of those guilt-free indulgences. Books for a buck. Who could resist that?
We floated around the warehouse-like space looking at title after title. I was delighted to find a whole section of beautiful hardback children's books (dustcovers and all). Even though Daniel long outgrew these, I am a sucker for the amazing illustrations and was delighted to find a book done by David Diaz. I have a series of framed pieces in our dining room that until discovering this book, I had not known were done by him. We found stuff for Daniel, and gifts for relatives. Bryan found various books on music and faith. We also found a book called...
"How to Pay for College".
Ha. I guess buying books for a buck is a good way to start.
We left the store with our newly acquired treasure, a box of books. Later the books were sorted in piles on our coffee table. When Daniel came home he buzzed around the stacks like a bee. He grabbed one of the Julia Cameron books and I had to resist the urge to say, "hey that's not for you!". We had three copies for cryin-out-loud.
Books make great gifts. Especially if you can get the dollar sticker off.
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