Little Red Caboose
We open our picnic on a table under a cherry tree aching to bloom, next to a red caboose perched on its track. Peanut butter and jam sandwiches, hummus and carrots, peeled apples, banana muffins with butter. Spread out, too, are the books just bought from the bookstore housed partially in the caboose – Hattie and the Wild Waves, Hush Little Baby – their covers are safely exposed. No rain today, only the threat of crumbs and sticky fingers. As I read and lunch vanishes, couples and families walk by, smiling our way. A mother reading to her children. I can’t help but feel like animals on display, a dying breed.
We have come to say goodbye to Looking Glass Bookstore, one of Portland’s independent booksellers, another casualty of the recession, e-book trends and Amazonian competition. My children know this will be the last time we’ll be able to browse, but are mostly oblivious as to why. They were disappointed to find an “off-limits” chain on the ladders going up to the caboose seats, where just last spring we had read Blueberries for Sal and watched the foot traffic under the parasolling cherry. Through the opposite window we could hear the book traffic below inside the sunken, tucked-away store. Classical music and muted conversations streamed between the aisles, the collar-shake of the resident black lab, Charlie.
Today we sat in the children’s section and search through books hand-picked by the owner, Karin Anna, books that will be requested over and over, bed-time after bed-time. We took a long time choosing. More and more people walked through the opened red door advertising 25% off everything – either lured by the sale sign, or, like us, paying our respects, sitting on the floor like devotees one last time.
And then, it was Mama’s turn. Down the steps to a cement floor, worn as marble. Poetry filled two sides of rolling shelves, titles not found elsewhere, books by friends and acquaintances waiting to be chosen. My children sat next to the sliding glass door that frames a secret, mossed garden. A little ways away the dog lay like a black rug, not minding people stepping over him. Time slowed to bookstore time, and the only thing on display was the luxury of choosing. From their periphery, my children watched me lift collections, mouth lines, stop, go back, tuck one finally under my arm – witnesses to books and readers choosing each other, the near-silent shuffle-slide-squat dance only seen really well at a child’s, or dog’s, eye level.
Once outside with our treasures, I want to linger. It’s not often you get to walk up, press a hand on a little red caboose’s thick paint job. Its clearstory windows are empty. Nobody waves from a blinking black box on the back of a freight train. I know that this trip down bookstore-lane will be more than a dog-eared memory in my children’s yet-to-be-filled volumes. And that calms me. My voice steadies as my heart cracks, not for the last time and I read each of their books a second time. The buds above have yet to open. Let someone sit down with us for a moment under its thinned canopy, and listen.
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