The Great American Love Story

I once had a job as a barista. Not the famous bikini-clad gals that keep the Pacific Northwest men driving 20 minutes out of the way for a quick and casual Cafe-Au-Lait, but an old school Starbucks girl working in, of all places, Saugus Mass. It was 1996ish and Barnes and Noble was a new bookstore on Route 1.I cannot remember what possessed me to apply for a job there, although I suspect my salary from the Malden Public Schools might have had something to do with it. I also feel pretty sure that I did not apply specifically to don the green apron, I think I wanted to work in the Children's Section memorizing Dr. Seuss and filling boring moments rifling through Mad Libs. Anyway, that's not how it all went down. Somehow this girl, a girl who, mind you, hates coffee, got a night job working at the Starbucks inside Barnes and Noble. Things started out slow, or slowly for you adverb freaks, but within a week or so a handsome stranger walked into the cafe and a new love affair was born.

Okay, okay, he wasn't handsome; he was short and heavy-set with thick square glasses, a wide red nose and a slight drooling problem. No matter though, he had in one hand a thick hardcover book and in the other a porcelain mug of steamy cappuccino. He sunk into one of those cushy chairs at the edge of the cafe, cracked his book and stayed. He read and read into the wee hours of the night (that would be 9:30 in retail-speak). He rarely moved, but to wipe the occasional string of saliva hanging from his significant chin. Call me romantic, but I just couldn't keep my eyes off of this stranger. Alright, you've got me, it wasn't the man I was looking at…it was the book.

Sure, I had seen books before, thousands of them. Strewn on the floor of my bedroom, stacked 26 floors high at the UMASS library, squeezed into nooks and crannies of the apartment where I grew up, in my classroom, at my friends' houses, in doctors’ offices, in cars, on top of coffee tables and don't forget in the bathroom; for what's a bathroom without a good stack of books? So what was it that struck me that night? I suppose it was that the man in front of me was reading for choice, for recreation, for the enjoyment of a good story. It had been a while since I had done such a thing.

As a child I absolutely loved reading and as I grew older it wasn't so much that I stopped enjoying it, it was more that other things came to the forefront. By the time I was in 8th or 9th grade reading was done only for schoolwork purposes. Friends, boys, movies, friends, socializing, shopping, dances, phone calls, parties and the like were my focus for free time. Once in college I could find a bit of time here and there for some literature, I took a few really fantastic com-lit classes, but reading for just the pure love of it, well those times were few and far between. And so it wasn’t really love-at-first-sight at the café, it was a reunion. Literature and I were back together-reunited and it felt so good.

I think my first book in the rekindled romance was She’s Come Undone by Wally Lamb. And for a while I was all about Oprah’s book list and of course B&N employee recommendations ( somewhat bitter note: we back in the café never could recommend a thing except a 1300 calorie shortbread cookie to go with your latte, but the booksellers could throw any old title out there and call it a must-read). I eventually expanded my horizons; falling in love with biographies, classics, memoirs and humor. I adore the feeling you get again and again when you comprehend you’re reading a really good book and the afterglow of finishing one. I love the moment that you realize there’s no way you can put your book down. The deals you start making with yourself when you know you have real world responsibilities, but you’ll just die if you don’t know what happened next. Will she ever find her mother? Did he really hide his son for all those years? Who really was there that night? And of course, how in the world did David Sedaris made it out of the nudist camp?
Six or seven years ago I started a book club with some friends in Connecticut. We loved reading, drinking wine, eating good food, visiting each other’s homes and discussing our books. I loved our little group and though two women dropped out explaining that we were not intellectually stimulating enough, I thought we had remarkable conversations. Well, remarkable for a bunch of dunces anyway.
So nowadays I am not in a face to face book club, which is kind of a bummer, but every once in a while I can stumble upon a good book conversation on Facebook. It’s not the same as sitting around a table drinking wine, eating chocolate and discussing Amy Tan, but it works for now. I have received quite a few good recommendations via friends on FB. This week there have been several posts about books and it put me in the mood to chronicle my own love affair with the printed word.
It’s the classic love story if you think about it. We found each other when I was young and naive, we grew apart and then one seemingly ordinary day, in a little café outside of Boston, we found each other again. The romance continues…