Where’s Waldo II (Why men left fiction, cont.)

Back in the 2000’s Pooky-Bear and I lived for a stretch in a very small community in West Tennessee. Moving there from Nashville was not easy, especially for her. The shopping opportunities out there in the sticks were obviously not the same. Even Amazon was still new and limited at the time, so Pook was not only lonely there, she was bored too. Needless to say she was excited when my job brought us back to Nashville.

It was not so hard for me. I enjoyed the slower pace and tight community of Henry County. What I missed there was a book store. Now, as I have already stated Amazon was around back then and books were their thing at the time, so I gratefully took advantage of that, but there is nothing like an actual bookstore where you can hold a book, measuring it’s weight and testing it against others of its kind before roaming over to the classics section, or the history and philosophy racks in your search for everything interesting. Unlike anyplace else time warps around you in a bookstore, patiently lingering there for your perusal. Yes, bookstores were the one thing I missed during my displacement from modern civilization, so I was as happy as my Pooky-Bear herself was to know that our new house in Hendersonville would have a Barnes and Noble minutes away.

And at first all was well enough. My forays there were as I remembered, but that quickly changed. My bookstore trips steadily grew shorter, less frequent, and ever more disappointing. I understood that my favorite writers were aging in some cases, even dying in others, but I couldn’t understand why they weren’t being replaced? Where were the up-and-coming Clancy’s, L’Amour’s, DeMille’s, and Grisham’s? Hell, somehow even greats like Faulkner, Penn Warren and Gary Gallagher were only able to warrant two title spaces on all these rows of shelves, if that? Instead of leaving the store enchanted I was now leaving it with that same nagging disappointment that Pooky-Bear and I seemed to leave the movie theater with anymore, complaining to each other as we walked out about another fifty dollar dud.

And I must not have been the only one with that disappointing feeling. It somehow did not bother me when that Barnes and Noble near my home closed up a couple of years ago. Hell, I wasn’t even surprised when my wife told me they had shuttered it; the store suffering the death of a thousand cuts (that is to say from half of the population walking out without one of those fancy, oversized plastic bags because no; he did not need a tassled bookmark featuring an inspirational quote, a potpourri crock pot, or a $12 Pumpkin-spiced latte along with his romantic thriller).

It sounds harsh, I know. It is harsh, in fact. But that is how a man becomes when the valuable things in his world are progressively bungled away… harsh.

But then, by being brushed off he has been harshly treated too, has he not? Isn’t it as good not to read than to read what is not for you? Wouldn’t we all rather do without than to deal with less than?

I know I would.