Saturday, February 24, 2007
Home away from home
These days I sometimes make a pallet on the floor and call the bookshop home for the weekend. I work Friday to Sunday. Except for my lunch breaks and moments necessary to meet other bodily needs, I can be found at the store (during normal operating hours of course) from 11am Friday until 6pm Sunday. I used to go home, even for my lunch breaks. That was when home was with my girlfriend in Durham. Now that I broke up with my girlfriend, I had to find a new home. Good thing I still have part ownership of a house in Burlington. It's a great old house (see pictures here) that my buddy Noah and I (with a whole lotta help from family, significant others, and friends) have spent the last 8 odd years restoring. I lived their briefly but decided to leave last summer and move in with my girlfriend. Now I'm back at the house while I finish my undergraduate degree at UNC-Greensboro. So I'm living in Burlington and coming to Durham on the weekends to work. Between being at the shop all day and the drive home being 45 minutes one way, I find it better to stay in Durham rather than doing all that driving. Most weekend nights I feel like getting out of the store for a couple of beers with friends after work. But some nights, especially when I have a lot of schoolwork to tend to, I like to lock the door behind my departing coworkers, and enjoy having the bookshop, with unused cafe space, all to myself. Last night I made a salad, had a beer with it, read an interview with the British theologian Sarah Coakley for my class entitled "God, the Body, & Sexual Orientation", and then read some more in Kobo Abe's novel The Woman in the Dunes, then I practiced playing Buffalo Girls on the baritone ukulele. Then I turned out all the lights and headed for the "fur vault" (The bookshop is in a building which originally housed a dry cleaners and they had a vaulted room where they stored furs for the summer. Now it is sans vault door and serves as the shipping and receiving area for the store.) where I squirmed into my sleeping bag, zipped myself up, set my alarm on my cell phone, and drifted off to sleep. Call me crazy, but I kinda like calling the bookshop home away from home on the weekends. (Not that I want to live like this for the rest of my life, mind you.)
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
There are at least a couple of SF stories I can think of where people are spared during some disaster because they were asleep in a vault (or something close to it). One is a Twilight Zone episode you've probably seen. Another is a short story whose title I can't remember. There were two survivors. What I remember about that story (what stuck out among all the other "We're the last people on Earth" stories) was that the surviving man, in "marrying" the surviving woman, wove her a wedding ring out of grass, instead of taking one from a jewelry store. Since it was grass, it would wear out on occasion, and he would have to make a new one by weaving another -- sort of a symbolic re-affirmation of his vows.
BTW, just when I thought Sage (the reader I use for syndicated blogs) was working better, it hides a blog post from me for a week. Argh.
Post a Comment