It began like my Tuesdays generally do: with an open to close day at the bridal salon. Just tonight I was talking with a coworker, at my second job, that I never truly saw a need to dislike the general public until I began working retail. They can be an interesting amalgamation of personalities, but in the wedding industry, they are generally nosey, or "simply curious" is how they might phrase it. Figurative language at its finest, I assure you.
I talk about books and reading often at the bridal salon. That and what shows we are all watching on television. If I do not, I get to answer, "Are you seeing anyone?" or "Are you married?" multiple times a day, when I am not asking the necessary nuptial-oritented questions. Being a sales consultant affords me the ability to meet the people us readers only ever dream about. One of the brides I worked with is a manager at a B&N in the metro area. Another was having a literature themed wedding: she looking for something Roaring 20s, her groom to be decked in Regency attire. There is something satisfying about knowing all those Pinterest book lovers' wedding photographs are not staged and that such couples actually exist. It gives readers like me hope that a wedding registry at Barnes&Noble may, one day, become in-vogue or a trend worth initiating.
This particular Tuesday began with a series of text message exchanges between myself and a girlfriend I had not seen in over a month. Considering our fourteen minute commute between front doors, and the fact that I perceive Denver, Colorado to be "down the road," such extended absence is frowned upon. We were to grab coffee at the conclusion of my shift, presuming we closed on time, which almost never happens rolling into summer wedding season.
By her lunch break, we were calling for a second rain check. She felt bad. Someone had given her tickets to the Pens game that night and she wanted me to come with her. Puck dropped at 7pm. I reminded her I was not done until 7, but the Devil often controls quitting time. She would need to leave no later than 6 if she was to beat out traffic, maybe earlier for decent parking. I insisted she make arrangements with someone who actually had been to a hockey game before and we would have coffee another time.
She relented and I promptly moved up plans with a friend I was not to see until Thursday. We graduated high school together and, in Fall 2012, realized we had transferred to the same university back home after taking a seat in a Travel Writing class; she a Writing major, myself a History major. Since our December university graduation, and despite our seven minute door-to-door, it had been even longer since I had seen her. I had told her I was in need of a bookish fix. It followed in a similar series of texts recollected as such:
S: Hey! Plans have changed tonight. Still available to go book hunting?
A: Absolutely. I am always up for books.
S: Brilliant. My friend got tickets to a Pens game that starts when my shift is finished. I told her I would pass on attending.
A: Really? If given the choice is it not obvious: books? men wrestling on ice?
S: I will always choose books if given the choice, but I understand the allure of free tickets.
A: Taken. What time?
S: Done with work at 7 o'clock. Will confirm when we actually lock the shop door.
A: See you then.
Truly a magnificent alternate activity. I caught her up on my new, and rabid, love of Shakespeare brought on by the Hollow Crown. I explained to her the premise and the actors present: Ben Whishaw, Sir Patrick Stewart, Jeremy Irons, Tom Hiddleston, Clarence Posey, the actor who plays Argus Filch whose name always escapes me when I need it, and the awful villain of a business man in Sahara, among others. I then told her that Benedict Cumberbatch, whom she refers to a Fandom Fingers (an origin story I shall have to delight you with another time), is to be Richard III in the continuing Hollow Crown installments in 2016, after assuming Hamlet on the London stage in 2015.
Immediately, she declared me one of "those fans." Her insistence that Shakespeare characters are often flat followed us, from Best Buy to the Drama section of B&N, with the conclusion that Hamlet is her least favorite of the ones she has read because he is "a whiny, spoiled, complaining bitch of a prince who gets nearly everyone, including himself, killed." How her delivery, so matter of fact, often threatens to crush my rib cage in upon my lungs and heart.
I make no excuses about it, though. I experience explosive excitement when I know literature is being translated well. I can become excited about most things with minimal effort. If I am passionate about it or if it is particularly clever, I am hooked. And yet, she writes me off with chagrin when she is the one who admitted to me that she broke down and watched the Avengers for the same reason every fangirl on tumblr did: for Loki. One example of why I avoid tumblr like the modern day bubonic plague.
I am, most astutely, the kettle to her pot.
Despite the sharp contrasting views we may take in regards to the classics, there are things upon which we mutually agree:
1. Outside of J.K. Rowling, no author may have defined our childhood more than Brian Jacques, whose last name I will still pronounce as if I were in intermediate French class in school and not in the Western-PA butchered pronunciation of "Jakes." I can think of no other reason an English author would allow such lazy syllabic emphasis.
2. A night of books will always be a better option than hockey because I do not need to wear a coat inside a temperature controlled bookstore. And why would I bother going to a hockey game? I am going to sit there reading and be cold doing it, without access to Earl Grey or English Breakfast or Chai tea. As a tea and not a coffee drinker, this is threatening violence or silence.
Her points cannot really be argued with or, for me, I can think of no better counter arguments. I will leave that to someone who understands the hockey. My sports knowledge is limited to four things: soccer (because I played it), basketball (a lot of my friends played it), equestrian (I trained for it and had that one PC game that taught you all the rules), and tennis (my little brother was doubles champion one summer, after three hip surgeries). My friend is an addict right along with me and that is vastly important. It takes a reader to know a reader. To have someone willing to hold you accountable in a book shop and vice versa, not in the way your mothers do because you cannot dawdle, but in the "they close at nine, we cannot sleep here" kind of way.
You need to have that friend who will make you feel better by telling you something that speaks to you on a core level. Whether it is recommending an audio book you chewed through in under four days because it became compulsion or it is the announcement that J.R.R. Tolkien's translation of Beowulf is being released after NINETY years and what wretched grinch could possibly have withheld it for so long. You will both mutually agree they are, in the most cliched sense, tyrants.
My friend is the kind of friend who will go with me to every midnight Hobbit and Lord of the Rings premiere until the end of time. She also told me that anyone that did not think Desolation and Benedict's, unfortunately for her, perfect embodiment of Smaug was not the most accurate and fantastical thing to be realized about childhood that I should promptly remove them from my friends circle, both in reality and by virtual association. No one deserves to have such negativity in their lives.
That is the kind of friend you need. The kind where the stress of life can be alleviated by saying one word: Books. No question mark. No explication. Just books and maybe, going through withdrawal and they will be all too happy to assist in getting you both a fix of the best possible thing to be made of paper and ink. They will be the friend that would not think it ridiculous to take the literary tours, to fly all the way to Paris just to see Shakespeare & Company, who think Half Priced Books is a marvel, and who insist the Tattered Cover, in Denver, is what your heaven will look like.
Sometimes the cure for going through withdrawal for the book worm in us, is to take one friend, get in the car, get in an argument over literature or listen to a live recording of David Sedaris at Carnegie Hall, and drive. To a book store. A Starbucks. No where and back.
After all, there are two choices when you believe the words are missing: to read them or to write them.
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