Downward Dog For Thinky

There is no place as divine as the Small Town indie book store. It is where I go when I have no kids with me and don't want to go home quite yet or don't know what else to do, but it's also where I go when I have kids with me: it's an elixir to their jumpiness sometimes. The quiet hum of the paperbacks and the pop-ups and the leather bounds coo to them and soothe their toy-aisled souls and who can say no to a kid wanting a book, so I get to be nice and cooed to and soothed all at the same time. It is yoga or church for the thinky.

The Small Town Book Store smells like a massage, or the way a massage would smell if you could smell one. Everyone and everything is hushed, but for the tunes playing (which I hear and don't hear, depending on what I see and read). Even the walls and windows seem mellow, quiet standers-by, loving constants, familiar the way most walls and windows aren't in public places. The violet hair of the girl behind the counter is more ballet than head banging, more beautiful than Manic Panic, and it's always exactly as it should be, even though it changes all the time (fuschia, black, cranberry).  It's like a clock I can't set my own by but that seems on-time every time.

There is a glass jar by the register filled with poems typed on squares of scrap paper. I reach in, as I'm invited to, and flip around a bit or just grab the one on top. My method doesn't matter: like choosing numbers for the lottery, there is no science here. I reach in with one hand, hand over a wad of cash with another, I pull out a square, I take my new book -- bought on instinct without recommendation, bought on a gamble, twenty bucks toward a wish that it will be everything I want it to be, that it will pay back in dividends -- and I leave with it and my tiny free poem which is the only true sure thing of the day.

It's my random snags of a snippet of paper, gifts from the Small Town Book Store, that have offered more weird truth than any horoscope or tarot card ever did or could; that have been more meaningful than most books I bought. It's the fact they have that cookie jar with it's mysterious fortunes and also because they are there, with piles of bound words and picture books on the busiest corner in town no less where only one push through the double doors will provide me all that I need when I need it, that I will never order books online or buy them anywhere else. 

 Today, I grabbed this:

Valentine for Ernest Mann

by Naomi Shihab Nye

You can't order a poem like you order a taco.

Walk up to the counter and say, "I'll take two"

and expect to have it handed it back to you

on a shiny plate.

Still, I like your spirit.

Anyone who says, "Here's my address,

write me a poem," deserves one in reply.

So I'll tell you a secret instead:

poems hide. In the bottom of our shoes,

they are sleeping. They are shadows

drifting across our ceilings the moment

before we wake up. What we have to do

is live in a way that let's us find them.

Once I knew a man who gave his wife
two skunks for a valentine.
He couldn't understand why she was crying.
"I thought they had such beautiful eyes"
And he was serious. He was a serious man
who lived in a serious way. Nothing was ugly
just because the world said so. He really
liked those skunks. So he reinvented them
as valentines and they became beautiful.
At least to him. And the poems that had been hiding
in the eyes of the skunks for centuries
crawled out and curled up at his feet.

Maybe if we reinvent whatever our lives give us
we find poems. Check your garage, the odd sock
in your drawer, the person you almost like, but not quite.
And let me know."