Dalton Delan | The Unspin Room: Giving back the years in a small bookstore
It was a typical Saturday at the used bookstore I managed.
They were lined up at the twin registers — recently brought online, will wonders never cease — with arms full of picture books for kids and grandkids, cookbooks to feel French without the cost of an Air France flight, romance novels whose covers revealed the rippling torsos of long-haired rogues whose six-pack abs made me suck in my gut, World War II histories for the teen with autism whose frustrated father would make him leave half behind at the counter, novels about vampires for the young woman who had asked me earlier where to find the nonfiction section on the creatures, and on and on, as various and wondrous as the hungry minds and thin wallets of the characters whose custom we retained, year upon year, because the scent of used books was like baking bread for our crowd.
Things were even more backed up than usual because of the electrical fire in one of the adjacent stores that morning. As the heavily laden firefighters tromped through the aisles sniffing for the source of the danger behind the walls, the chief stopped in front of me and did his best “Exorcist”-style head spin. “Say, what are all these: old books?”
Holding down the umbrage I took from his accusatory tone, I let on with pride that these were, indeed, used books. Whipping out his pen, before exiting the store to search elsewhere for the elusive electrical blaze, he informed me that we were going in the official record, as he recorded it, as redolent of “old book smell,” so future firefighters wouldn’t think it was electrical fumes or dead rodents, say.
Half the work of a used bookstore is the intake that replenishes the stock and gives the customers a way to level the locks on the literary canal. But, given all the hubbub, I had missed a big buy that had arrived that morning. Once the clock crawled past 7 in the evening and I was into our last hour, with its customary post-prandial quiet, I noted an unusual sight amidst the boxes and bags we had bought that day: a large footlocker, still locked, with no key. Fetching a screwdriver, I popped the lock. Amidst a morass of paper sat an overstuffed photo album. In it: the record of a wedding and the early years of a baby’s life — not the sort of thing you would ordinarily toss. I checked our purchase records for the footlocker; it looked to be from the dispersal of a house’s contents post-mortem. These were oft interesting, always sad.
Then it jumped at me: the name on the wedding announcement on the first page. The groom’s name was the same as a colleague of mine who lived hundreds of miles away. Could it be? The bride’s name was not one I recognized as his wife. We typically tossed personal effects such as these, but this time the coincidence piqued my interest and concern; did they really mean to throw this out? After all, the footlocker had been sealed. Someone just didn’t care.
With the old rotary-dial phone we kept in the store to amaze the kids, I dialed my colleague’s long-distance number. Hesitantly, believing nothing would come of it, I described the contents to him. There was a long silence, followed by a deep sigh.
“I wondered what had become of that album. When our daughter was only three, my first wife gave in to a lifelong depression and died by suicide. Her parents blamed me and we never spoke again. Last week, I learned that the surviving member of my in-laws had passed away. They lived down your way.”
“I guess you’d like the album then,” I ventured.
Said he: “You’d be giving me back those years. All the pictures were there.”
So I boxed it up, and Monday morning I took it to the Post Office. I thought about the crossroads of the soul our little bookstore inhabited. Had it landed anywhere else, it would have ended in the dump. Had one of our other buyers seen it, likewise. Over hundreds of miles and several decades, it had found its way to me, and back to my colleague, who could now show his grown daughter her early years, before the darkness claimed her mother for good. Since that call, my colleague has never spoken to me about it.
Now, I visit the bookstore in my dreams from time to time, and when I do, I’m always searching the aisles of books looking for something. I get close, but it ever eludes me. Is it my colleague’s lost years, or my own that come to me at night? Somewhere out there is a rusty old footlocker where all our memories wait to be reunited and reclaimed.
Dalton Delan can be followed on Twitter @UnspinRoom. He has won Emmy, Peabody and duPont-Columbia awards for his work as a television producer.
