On the sixth day, I walked. I got Mom to drop me off at St. Armand's Circle again, and I went to the bookstore I was at the day before, a small independent store, with very loud proprietors, they sold mostly best sellers, although you'd find some surprising stuff in the Literature section, which they kept separate from fiction. I don't know how they distinguished it, maybe mass market paperback from the rest, who knows? At any rate, I DID want to buy something, (me in a bookshop without buying something is like asking Jamie Oliver to keep his clothes on in a cheese shop....oh wait, wrong analogy there. Sorry. Note to self; internal thought, internal thought...) and spent a good half hour browsing.
Now browsing in a bookshop is NOT like shopping for anything else. It isn't like buying clothes (they either fit or they don't, they either make your ass look like a football field or they don't, fait accompli) or furniture (which people inevitably do in couples, I suspect, largely so they can fight in public) or even music, (nobody in his right mind buys an album he hasn't heard the music to) although one might be tempted to think so. I often think of book buying and book reading like going on dates. A bad cover can discourage you completely (if I ever get anything published, I am having complete approval on all covers going out on any books I ever publish) but aside from that, unless you KNOW the book (you've seen the movie already, read rave reviews about it) or read it years before, it really IS terra incognita, and you kind of have to play along for a bit. You get the tone of voice in the first few chapters, and you see if you like the voice; is it elegant, goofy, funny, terribly moving, or irritating as all fuck? This is important to note. Buying a book, you obviously can't stand there in the store and read the first few chapters, but you have to have a head for sizing it up, rather like you do on a date. Some dates, you take one look and think, "Oh no. How soon can I feign a migraine?" With others, (or so I've been told) you're practically raping each other with your eyes over the aperatifs. Books can be like that. You might gripingly get through them, chuck 'em across the room and never see them again. Others change your life, and you take them with you everywhere. It just depends on the book, just as it depends on the person. At any rate, I ended up grabbing two, Kazuo Ishiguro's NEVER LET ME GO, and a French novel called HECTOR AND THE SEARCH FOR HAPPINESS by a psychiatrist named Francois LeLord.
I wandered around the circle, looked in a few very tacky art shops, and finally just walked down the street and out to Lido Key, where the beach was. It had to be one of the cleanest beaches I'd ever been on. Not very many people on it, as it was rather windy, but it was sunny and warm for the most part. I put my towel down, unpacked my bag, lie down and started reading my books. Did that for about an hour, when I realized I was getting hungry, and so I packed up my stuff, and walked along and found this wonderful confectionary restaurant thing in the middle of the beach. The guy who owned it was a young guy from Buffalo, and as it was off-season, it was just him and two other guys running the whole shebang. Very chatty and personable, and very funny. I hung around and gabbed with him while waiting for my lunch. Which was reassuring, as you knew it hadn't been just sitting there all morning, collecting flies, but that they were making it fresh, thank heavens. Anyway, I took my lunch and sat down at a stone table under some shade and started reading my book. Then I had the strangest feeling I was being watched. I looked up, and sure enough, I was. A large white heron, quite beautiful, was standing not two feet away, staring at me with his lovely long head tilted at an angle, as if to ask, "Well? Where's MY lunch?" I had seen this tilt of the head on every cat and dog (and a fair number of humans too) that I'd ever lived with, and I knew it meant, "I'm being cute for your benefit. Give me something."
Having been surrounded by cuteness all of my life, I was pretty much immune to it. SO, I just looked at him (her?) square in the eye (eyes? they were on either side of his/her head, which would account for the back and forth tilting of his head when I spoke) and said, "No. Now go lay down." Which is what I said to all the dogs and cats (and those few humans) that had ever come begging at the table. I didn't know if it was going to work on a long-legged snow-white heron, but it couldn't hurt. He circled around me for about another five minutes, saw I was immersed in my book, and then just took off and flew away. THAT was impressive. Had I known he was going to do that, I might have just given him a French Fry. But since I was eating chicken strips, I thought THAT might have been faintly cannablistic, so I refrained.
After lunch, I went back to the beach, but the wind had picked up, so I went back to St. Armand's and found a tiny little Irish pub, where I had two beers and had a lovely chat with the waitress/bartender. Her boss was a bit of a micro-managing control freak ("Wipe the counter THIS way, not that way.") but she just shrugged, smiled, and went along with it. Mind you, perhaps I was just overly sensitive to female, middle-aged, micro-managing control freaks. But I finished my drinks, had a lovely chat, and went to meet Mom over at the Columbia restaurant, and then we went home. I had a lovely supper, watched some TV, and then crashed early. AGAIN!
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