Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from December, 2009

2010

Happy New Year, and it looks pretty promising: a.) I enter the new year employed b.) there's music on the horizon from The dB's, Radio Free Music Club, Luego, the Jakeleg and the kids' shows. c.) everyone's healthy d.) nine years sans alcohol e.) old debts have been squared f.) my writer's block seems to have abated Thank you for visiting here. I'm not the most consistent correspondent, but I'm certainly the least dependable and that should count for something. May your own new years be eventful only in good ways and full of love, friendship and great music. PH

Christmas

We had a nice one in Durham. The children came away from it satisfied and exhausted. Smart Wife made a devastating French onion soup and a small roast beef sandwich which I had when I got home from the airport. I got to experience "I Wish It Could Be a Wombling Merry Christmas Everyday" by Roy Wood and the Wombles, and I hope you do too. I got everything I wanted, including hi-hat cymbals, and it was all very chill, with one exception: in the first half hour I was at work, I heard a father loudly berating his daughter for forgetting her book. His voice carried throughout the store, and the sound was harsh and unnerving. They came around the corner and the father announced that his daughter "needed a book." The girl looked like she was in shock but not unused to this. I addressed her, not Dad, and I showed her A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L'engle. They bought it and left, and I hope she lost herself in that book when they were on the plane to wherever

The sky

Yesterday, I got to work at 7am, as usual, driving through the dark from Durham where I live to the Employee Parking Lot. I worked at Terminal 1 which is on the older side of RDU airport. There, to meet me, was a beautiful morning sunrise sky, all salmon pink and red and yellow. The east windows are across the hall from the store, a long line of glass panes that let you see a little take off and landing action, but mostly sky. And what a sky to enjoy, a living moving sunburst like on a 1959 Les Paul. For about ten minutes, I went about my business restocking shelves and helping customers, with the morning streaming in at me and a quiet satisfied smile on my face. I left work at 3:30pm. The sky was already starting to move toward the evening, darkening slightly, a rich deep blue with scant clouds and mostly visible clarity. It took about twenty minutes to drive home from RDU. All through the ride, I was treated to a spectacular batch of broadening colors, culminating in a near su

The View from the Airport

Working at my new job is a strange affair. It's a bookstore in name only; in reality, it's a newsstand that has a larger-than-average selection of books and stuffed animals, magazines and travel games. And no bottles of water, although we do carry water bottles. The first couple of hours' worth of customers basically want newspapers and no conversation. The management wants their adept booksellers to ply them with questions about our coupon club and our book drive, but mostly, the early morning customers are disinterested, anxious for their coffee to kick in and to board their flights on time. I don't blame them. This experience is completely different from my old bookstore job in New Orleans. The airport store is all about moving the hit titles; we sell a lot of Grisham, Patterson and Cussler mass-market (small) paperbacks, and the Sarah Palin 'autobiography' as I mentioned in an earlier post--we have some customers who like to hide Going Rouge , the rebut

Attention Shoppers!

Attention shoppers! I'd like to do my annual drum-beating for Nice Shirt, Kid which is my Smart Wife's printing concern. Besides her kids' t-shirts and onesies (fiddles and ukes are new) she has towels and new toddler skirts--very cool repurposed wearables. Here is where you'll find her: Nice Shirt, Kid on Etsy (I'd like this stuff even if I didn't love her so much.)