BOOKIN' OUT THE STORM

BOOKIN’ OUT THE STORM

A BOOKSTORE-Y

by  George Cowmeadow Bauman

Florida’s Hurricane Irma blew three booklovers into the Acorn Bookshop.  Here are their stories.

1

The bookstore staff was sad when Geoff Guthrie moved to Florida several years ago.  He was a longtime seller of brand new collectible books to us;  he’d done very well with what we paid him for them, and we’d done very well selling his signed/ limited editions of Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror books, which he got from subscriptions to publishers’ limited edition clubs.  Stephen King.  Ray Bradbury.  Neil Gaiman.  All signed and limited.  And many more.  We bought and sold ‘em all.

         Weirdly, he occasionally bought back books he’d sold to us—at our retail price!  Seller’s remorse is the condition he was afflicted with.  But he paid for those books with credit from the fresh batch he was always bringing in.  He isn’t the only person to buy back books he sold us.  Sam Leopold has been doing that with Young Adult books for years, and we all know that on some visits to sell us books, he’ll also negotiate to buy a book or two back from us. 

         Florida has been Geoff’s home for about five years, and no one’s replaced him and his regular deliveries of great books.  We often reminisce about how we loved seeing him walk in with his two large canvas bags, stuffed with goodies.  Pay Day for him, Book Day for us.

         He called us last week to say that with Hurricane Irma about to make a direct hit on Florida, a Category 5 storm with winds up to 185 MPH, and thought he might let the wind blow him north to Columbus and sell some books to us.

         We were happy campers/bookers to have Geoff ring our door’s chimes just about the time his home in Naples was getting seriously slammed.  “Nothin’ I can do about it, so I thought I’d come here and do business with you, though my boss isn’t happy that I’d fled from the storm.  I’m an IT programmer for a company that’s nationwide, so just because there’s a storm messin’ with our Florida headquarters, doesn’t mean we don’t have to keep all the other offices functioning.  So he was very reluctant to let any of us leave.  He’s a mean man generally;  I’ve had problems with him before.  I had to take several vacation days to drive up here, even though I might not have been able to get to the office because of roads being impassable!”

         He sighed, then added, “But he pays so much, I guess I have to put up with him.”

         Jack researched his five boxes Sci-Fi, Fantasy, and Horror offerings over two days, and we paid him $1000, thankful for his contributions once again to our success.

         “You might see me again this week,” Geoff said in leaving.  “I’m staying with a friend until the storm has finished having its way with Naples. I’ll go back as soon as I can so I don’t use up too many vacation days.”

         He shook his head and asked, “Why don’t they have Hurricane Days like schools have Snow Days?!”

 

2

A friendly, grizzled, guy who said he was a retired Florida lawyer shopped around for a while in the bookshop, upstairs and down, eventually bringing over a large stack of books, which jump-starts our bookseller hearts even as we’re playing it cool on the surface, chatting him up.

         He volunteered that he was lucky to be up north this weekend, instead of back home in Tampa, which looks like its going to get hit hard, according to the National Hurricane Center, which was busier than a rat and a cat in a suitcase.

         “I bought tickets four months ago to come to Columbus for my class reunion, otherwise I’d be stuck in Florida.  But when I left on Thursday, I thought perhaps the house wouldn’t be there when I got back. That’s a strange feeling, to know that everything in the house could be gone, blown away by that hurricane, much like how the (Caribbean) islands got wiped out yesterday.  But we were urged to evacuate, and I had no reason to go to a shelter down there when I had tickets for up here, so…” and he drifted off in thought.  His cell rang, and he took it outside for a few minutes. 

         Booksellers often get moments to practice our patience.  While customers reconsider their purchase or turn to someone for money or try to find a spouse or find a credit card that won’t be declined like the first one, we get to stand there with the transaction half-complete, perhaps someone else in line wanting to check out, and listen to the CD on our stereo, eavesdrop on customers’ conversations, or consider the evening’s appetizers for the coming book club.

         “My house is OK!” he exclaimed coming back in, needing to celebrate and share the good news, even with us strangers. 

“That call was my neighbor who promised to let me know how things went.  My house was spared, though some neighbors’ houses were damaged by trees.  One family had three cars destroyed by falling branches!  There’s a lot of debris in my yard, he said, but that’s nothing compared to what it could have been.  Oh, I’m so thankful!”

         Much relived, he said that he used this reunion up north as an excuse to go bookstore-bopping.  “I’ve been to bookstores in Michigan, Indiana, and Ohio, and I’ll tell you, even though I bought books in each of them, this bookstore beats them all for inventory and being organized.”

         We thanked him, and asked if he’d seen the basement selections.  Down he went.  His final tally was $92 and he rejected a bag for his books, choosing to “just throw them in the trunk with the others”. 

He paused at the side door, where so many great quips have been made by departing customers, and said, “This storm has sure been good to me book-wise!”

         Another customer overheard him talking about the hurricane, and said to us, “Have you heard that the Hemingway cats are all OK?  You know, those six-toed cats in Key West?” 

As a cat person, that greatly pleased me. 

But that was about the only bit of good news coming out of the storm-wrecked Keys.

“We got relatively lucky,” he said.  “Apparently we missed the biggest damage.  But it’s coming to wipe out the rest of Florida.  It’s a tough environment down there, being so close to sea level. 

         “Ohio is relatively safe from natural disasters,” he continued, “Though there are occasional tornadoes.  My parents were in Xenia when the tornado hit back in 1974.  The city looked like it had been bombed.  Our house lost part of its roof to the wind, and rain soaked through to a couple of rooms, but we were able to repair the place, unlike some of our neighbors, whose houses were ruined.”

         Looking around once last time, he said, “I’m glad the storm down there blew me into this bookstore up here.”

3

Our third refugee was a 60-ish guy in a faded aloha shirt who came to the counter after browsing a bit, having declined our offer to assist him.  As he set down his books to buy, he announced with a smile, “I’m a hurricane refuge! 

“I’m from Miami, and Hurricane Irma, has destroyed some Caribbean islands and is slamming into Florida at the Keys and will move right up the peninsula.  I’m sure glad I’m here in Columbus!”

         I told him, “You are a real novelty factor up here, being an escapee.  But once you get home, everyone will be telling their ‘What I did during Hurricane Irma’ stories.”  He laughed and said, “I’ll be sure to tell them about your bookstore!” 

We asked him how he was able to get out of Florida, for from what we’ve seen on the news and in texts from my nervous cousin Marge in Bradenton, all flights on all airlines were totally booked, and the airports were becoming refuge shelters of people waiting to catch a plane out to anywhere.  Kind of like how Linda and I fled Arctic Circle Finland in ‘98, running from the omnipresent thick swarms of blood-sucking mosquitos which were so aggressive that we called the tiny Finnish airport and asked for the very next plane flying to Europe—anywhere in Europe!

         He replied, “Thankfully, we bought our tickets months ago, for we’re in town for my niece’s wedding here, a great coincidence.  Otherwise I’d be struggling to get out of southern Florida like everybody else.”

         He pushed his two hardbacks across the counter to Christine, looked around wistfully, and declared, “I wish we had a bookstore like this in Miami.  I’d be in there every day.”

         As she rang up his two Aviation titles, he said, “When I was young, my family had a bookstore.”  That got my attention. 

“Where was it? I asked, endlessly curious about bookstores.

“In Auckland,” he replied, then added, “New Zealand,” as though we wouldn’t know where Auckland was. 

“We had it for four or five years.”

         He signed the charge-card slip, and as I bagged his books, he said, “My parents were a war-bride couple.”

“Oh, yeah?” I asked, sensing a story in the making.

“Yeah, my father was in the Navy during World War Two, and was on one of the ships that was sunk at Guadalcanal, the “Atlanta”.  He was badly injured in the attack, so they put him on a hospital ship and sent him to a hospital in Auckland.  My mother nursed him back to health, and they fell in love and got married.”  (Didn’t Hemingway already write this story?!)

As an aside, he said, “The American sailors in Auckland preyed on the young local New Zealand girls…and the girls loved it!” 

Getting back to his story, he related, “As soon as the war was over, my mother caught the first flight carrying civilians out of New Zealand, on Pan Am, and flew to New York on her own, though she was just 19 or 20, to reunite with my father.  She knew no one else in the States, so it was a really bold thing for her to do, very adventurous.” 

He smirked, raised his eyebrows and said, “Maybe I was the reason for that flight!”  We chuckled appreciatively, to keep him going.

“I’m guessing that she and my dad had corresponded and decided that they’d get married when she arrived.  And that’s what they did.

“Somehow they got in contact with the pilot of the plane that flew her from her home country to the US, so that the Pan Am captain could use his authority to marry them!”

The refugee from wild weather scooped up his books and put them under his arm, but continued with the story.

“They settled in New York for a while, but later they went back to live near her folks in Auckland.  That’s were they opened their bookstore;  I can remember hanging around it when I was a kid.  It was a young reader’s paradise!

“Eventually they moved to the States, where I grew up, and I’ve been a bookstore-lover ever since.”

He headed toward our side door, and called back over the display of Hemingway and Diana Gabaldon, “After my niece’s wedding, we’re supposed to fly home.” 

He paused, then concluded, “But we don’t know if we’re even going to have a home in Miami to go back to!” and out the door he went, one of our hurricane refugees.                     

         ©2017/ GEORGECOWMEADOWBAUMAN