Friday, March 27, 2015

Imponderables and Logos

Before the lighthearted account of my day at Logos, I can't not mention things I don't understand.  How in God's name does a young man get on a plane knowing he plans to kill himself and more than 100 people?  Such a terrible, terrible tragedy.

I also can't wrap my head around two police officers, married or in a relationship, who beat their 3 month old baby so badly the child is now in a vegetative state and not expected to live.  What sort of monsters do something like that?

And it is beyond belief that the governor of Indiana has now signed legislation which makes discrimination legal in the state.  Businesses are now legally permitted to discriminate against gay people.  What's next?  Gay and straight water fountains?  Anybody gay must ride at the back of the bus?

These are the things that make me want to cry, even though I can do nothing about them. I almost wish I had a trip planned to Indiana just so I could cancel it.

But I can report on the fairly quiet day at Logos yesterday.  The most exciting thing that happened for the first half hour was a guy walking by the place outside playing a drum and the crowd of people, munching ice cream cones, standing around looking in the window at the display table.

A couple came in who was noteworthy.  She definitely should not wear a clinging shirt if she is going to go bra-less.  It's OK if you have perky breasts, but if your breasts tend to reach to you waist, wear something else!  As for him he was wearing those earrings that go in huge holes in your ear.
 
This isn't him, but this is what I'm talking about.  I had to look it up and found out they are called "gauges."  Reminds me of a Bozo the Clown record I had as a kid and the Ubangi warriors who stretched their lower lips to impossible sizes.  As I watched him walk around the store, I was trying to imagine him old enough to live at Atria and wondering what he would look like at "almost hunnert."

There was a very thin young Chinese woman with her UCD hat worn backwards on her head and her arms crossed tightly across her chest as she browsed.  She ended up buying a book called "You're Less Dumb than you Think" and her friend bought Khaled Hosseini's "A Thousand Splendid Suns."

A young man was carrying a large piece of abstract artwork in pastel colors that, from a distance, looked like a visualization of an audio recording.  His arms were covered in tattoos.  I wonder, too, what he will feel like at Atria with the gouge guy!

A young woman needed a bathroom, but ours is not for customers so I sent her across the street.  Usually customers like that don't return, but she did later.

A father and son (looked kind of like Harry Potter in his glasses) were looking for a specific series of kids' books, which we did not have, so I sent him to the new bookstore down the street.

A woman wearing an eye-blinding combination of a very bright tie dyed shirt and a short cream and black colored skirt with a busy leaf pattern on it came in to donate a book about crocodile hunter Steve Irwin.  She wanted to know if we would be interested or not, since he had been dead for so long.

A couple came in.  She was looking for a book on hair braiding, but didn't find one.  Her companion bought three books on playing chess.

The next couple was a study in denim, as they were both dressed in denim from head to toe.  Her jacket and pants were heavily embroidered with a lovely design and she wore tall leather boots, also with a design cut into them.  She had platinum colored hair and dripped silver, from the 3 earrings on each ear to the multiple necklaces, bracelets and rings that she wore.  

Her partner, whose brown hair was twice as long as hers, was also in heavily embroidered denim, but his was more raggedy than hers.  He had many rings with very large stones.  The two of them sat at the front table and he read to her for awhile.  He finally bought "Le Mot Juste," a dictionary of foreign words and phrases, and a cowboy dictionary (didn't realize there were enough words specific to cowboys to warrant a whole dictionary!)

My friend arrived at 4:30 and bought a coffee table type book on the Tower of London.

The next interesting looking couple (who did not buy anything) was a guy wearing a shirt that said "The enemy's gate is down."  She wore an ankle-length skirt made of some sort of lightweight grey jersey material and a black camisole.  She had a tattoo on her back, below her shoulder and aqua flip flops.

The last customer was a grandma with her granddaughter, who looked to be about a year old, in a stroller.  She bought four kids' books while the little girl was gleefully saying 'Mama, Mama' over and over again, like it was a new word she had just learned and wanted to try out.

There was a poetry reading scheduled for the night so Susan arrived early with munchies and did some book shelving of donated books while I worked the last half hour.

It was not a big money day, but there was a goodly share of people of interest, and I made a big dent in the book that I'm reading.  This is the third week for this Ruth Rendell mystery and I should finish it before my next day at Logos.  I finished my last book, "Trousering Your Weasel" yesterday.  One of the funniest books of essays you'll ever want to read. I so wish I could write like that!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Wow!