Buh-Bye 2009!
This is one of those years when I have to say, “Thank heavens it’s over”. There were some bright spots, chiefly the return to Virginia of my daughter and grandson, who had been living in Michigan the past several years, but 2009 really has not been a good year in many ways. Most personal to me was the closing of our bookstore, Creatures ‘n Crooks Bookshoppe. I’m grateful to have the email & phone (and online soon) business and am so happy our book clubs decided to meet in our office space but I can’t tell you how much I miss the activities of a brick & mortar storefront.
You don’t really understand until it’s gone just what will be missing. I no longer have the pleasure of phone calls, emails and signing visits from authors, new as well as old favorites, and our remaining customers have also lost that pleasure. I can’t justify the expense of going to some of the various book conventions so that contact with authors, publishers and book fans is gone. Our beloved cat, Hamilton, has gone to a new home and, while I can see him every few weeks, it’s not the same as seeing him and cuddling with him every day. I miss our employee, Andrew—despite the occasional flareups we would have, he was with us from the beginning and we could always count on him. I hope his current employers appreciate him as much as we did. And none of us ever really got over the Christmas morning feeling of opening shipments from our publishers and wholesalers, the joy of discovering what was in the box.
Most of all, though, I miss the public, both our loyal customers and those people who strayed in but didn’t buy. For any retailer, the heart and soul of the business is the people you encounter every day. It was very rare for us to have a bad experience—the day Andrew chased an audio book thief out the door sticks out in my mind as well as the day a guy tried to convince Annie he’d been attacked by Hammie (completely laughable to anybody who knows the fluffybutt). Even on boring days when hardly anybody opened the door, there was always something joyful about being there and I don’t think we ever ended the day without at least one laugh. Not once did I ever not want to go to work and a lot of people don’t get to say that about their jobs.
And on a more widespread note, the other very unpleasant thing about 2009 was the economy and the ravages thereof. It hit all of us personally and I hated hearing how our customers were being affected—or not hearing but realizing they had stopped shopping with us. Bottomline, it killed the store.
Then, to add personal insult to injury, I ended the year with a chest cold and a dead car that cost almost $1,400 to fix, extra funds I sure didn’t have. Yuck.
So, enough wallowing in self-pity. It’s time to put this year behind us and, while I don’t think the economy is going to get a whole lot better in 2010, I do think we’ll see some improvement and that can only be a good thing. Perhaps we’ll drift away from our desire for excess and will begin to appreciate the more meaningful and less flashy things in life. In the meantime, Hamilton says “hi” 
December 31, 2009
Posted in: Tales of a Bookseller
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4 Responses
May things look up in 2010!
Here’s to a happy, healthy, and prosperous 2010! May the Decade prove more exciting than the last without crosing into the realm of “intersting times.”
May 2010 bring health, wealth, and goodness to you and all.
I miss working there too Lelia…No job can compare. I’m just catching up on all the blogging that’s been going on….a little slow I know…but I never had a mind that worked in a straight line so it takes me time to get my brain to remember something I wanted to check out and on top of that be in the right place to do the checking. Again I hope all is well! I’ll let you know next time I’m back in old VA, probably sometime this summer, we need to catch up! Later on -
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