By Claire Booth
I went to a bookstore yesterday. Such an ordinary sentence. Once.
Such an ordinary act. Before.
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California is slowly loosening its coronavirus restrictions, and
retail businesses are now allowed to open their doors to limited numbers of people
at a time. My happy place, Face in a Book bookstore in El Dorado Hills, Calif., decided on a maximum of four
customers at a time. They’d been offering free local delivery for a while, which
was great—but not a lot of browse-able fun. So yesterday, I was there, my masked
nose pressed eagerly against the glass as I waited my turn to get in.
Once inside, two other customers and I kept our distance and soaked
in everything on the shelves. Cookbooks, gardening, the new Mary Kubecka, a
biography of Billy the Kid, the Hunger Games prequel, so much more. After restraining
myself from actually touching every book in the store, I was rewarded by
getting to talk to a friend. She works there and we were able to catch up. What
would have pre-Covid been a nice chat became, now, a meaningful, wonderful conversation.
Don’t get me wrong. I’ve been places since the pandemic started. I’ve
gone to the grocery store and the hardware store. I’ve gone into work a few
times when I couldn’t do an office task from home. But this … this was a place I
wanted to be. Those other outings were getting on with living; this was
getting on with life.
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