Eternity in an hour–such are weeks when you are adulting.
Perhaps your weeks are the same. You have a wild one and you say, “Thank god that is over. Next week we don’t have anything planned.” But just as you clear a kitchen counter so your family can place NEW garbage down on it so see the Gods your empty calendar and fill it with…excitement. Much of it good. Much of it…experiential.
We’ve had our new window measured and ordered. We spent an alarming amount of time choosing the font for the decal. We argued over whether the Bookhouse Boys patch from Twin Peaks should be our new logo. (Jason argued against it.) And a lovely woman came in this week and gave us an unexpected moment of her time.
She wore a #justsayno t-shirt. But she was at the door and had a mask on, so we invited her in. We didn’t say anything. We welcomed her. She sanitized her hands. We were nervous. SHE was, at first blush, alert. She asked for a specific biography on Martin Luther. It was a good biography. Scholarly. So we checked the shelves. We said how good a biography it was. She said it was suggested to her by a friend. We eyed each other up and down, waiting for the other shoe to drop.
It didn’t.
The lady was kind. She was patient. And tired of the alarmist hackery, we were relieved. We asked if there was anything else she was looking for. She said books by Jacques Ellul. We had one. She looked at it. “I already have this one,” she said. Not a problem. She took a look at our religion section. We left her alone. She came up to the counter after and asked how often we get books in.
“All the time,” we said.
“Do you get much religion?” she asked.
“We do, but it’s mostly what students are studying up at Western.”
She was relieved that kids still study religion.
We suggested Cardinal Books in Birr, telling her that Cardinal has an exceptional theology section, and that it was a lovely shop to boot. She didn’t know about Cardinal and was glad to hear about it. She would visit. Everything seemed, for a moment, peaceable, like some unexpected armistice. Or perhaps we had both been drafted into some radical Culture War neither of us really wanted to fight in. We didn’t ask her about the t-shirt. We didn’t bring up anything like that at all. All three of us simply did our thing without yelling.
Now, we’re not trying to make this a parable. This isn’t a teachable moment. We resist that kind of thing. This just happened to us. And we took note. This lady was kind to us in our shop. Who knows what happens out there when the rally cry is called? Who knows what we might do if some other Revolution LARPer comes into our store?
It was just lovely for a moment, as the polar magnets shift, to not have to take up arms. Perhaps this is a sign of things calming down. We can hope. It means less mental fly-swatting when we’re trying to read, and less vigilance when trying to live.
All the best,
Jason and Vanessa
