A teenage son and I were at Powell’s City of Books in Portland, a recurring pilgrimage. I was browsing in Fiction when his distress call came.
He was half a building away, lurking in his favorite subsection of History. He had filled an entire basket with books to buy, and he needed help.
To his credit, he already knew he needed two kinds of help. He needed time to reduce his selections to a manageable stack of several. That took him most of an hour. Then he would still need more funds than he’d saved for books. He solicited and quickly received contributions from bookish family members, and he came away with a heartwarming but reasonable stack of books.
I like to listen to people in bookstores. I’ve overheard one sort of conversation many times, especially at used bookstores. The child in it can be a first-grader or a teen, and it goes about the same.
