The Friends of the Library Bookshop....

I had a lovely drive today, along Pacific Coast Hwy on my way to the Huntington Beach Central Library. The salt in the air, the herons in the Bolsa Chica wetlands to my left, the waves pulsing against the sand to my right.

It ceased being a lovely drive when I turned onto Goldenwest, a street that used to be flanked by grassy hills, yellow with flowers each spring, populated by equestrians with their mounts, navigating the small valleys.

When I was in elementary school I was mad for horses, and in fifth grade I managed to convince my grandparents that I needed riding lessons. My patient grandfather would sit in his car, watching me ride a tired plodding pony around in a circle. This lasted a couple years, until I was thrown from a slightly more feisty retired race horse in my jump class. My grandfather leapt over the railing and I was safe in the front seat of the car before I could even get the breath in my chest to protest. (My grandfather may have been looking for a reason to give up the long drives to the stables; however, I think he was mostly terrified that I could potentially break my neck, as one of my distant cousins had the year before.). The riding lessons stopped, and eventually my mania for horses dissipated.

The residents of Huntington Beach lost their affinity for the scrubby brush and sandy dunes of this area; the hills are covered by the type of housing development popular in South Orange County; the houses all identical, the walls high. The only reminder of what it used to look like is west Central Park; the hills unmanicured, the brush high and bright with spring flowers. It made me a little sad. I'd loved those hills as a child.

In any case, reverie aside, I found some joy in the library bookshop. A 1958 edition of H.W. Fowler's "A Dictionary of Modern English Usage". This is when you know you are truly a geek; I clasped it to my chest as if there were others trying to get to it before me. It's true- I got actually excited about a dictionary.

I also found a little happy surprise in the "literature" section. A copy of the Santa Monica Review, Spring 2003. And whose name should be on the cover? Eugene Ipavec. The SMR joined Fowler in my bag, along with a couple criticism books about Flannery O'Connor, a copy of both of Alice Sebold's books, Amy Tan's "The Bonesetter's Daughter", a couple of Richard Ford books, another by Ann Patchett "The Magician's Assistant", "Veronica" by Mary Gaitskill, and a collection of stories from the Iowa Writers Workshop.

A stack of books to read. What more can one ask?