Change is hard...

I left the bookstore too quickly.

We paid for our books and walked casually through the glass doors, back into the early evening light of downtown Seattle, and I would have returned to the car without a second thought except that Matt said, "I'm bummed -- this is the last time we'll buy books here!" And then I remembered. The entire point of our trip to Pioneer Square on Saturday was to go to to the Elliott Bay Book Company before it relocates to its new home on Capitol Hill. It's not closing, it's not dying, it's just moving, but things will be DIFFERENT and change is HARD. I really, really wanted to visit One Last Time.

The first book I ever bought at the Elliott Bay Book Company was Fingersmith by Sarah Waters. It was a sweltering July afternoon and my family was visiting, and we'd decided to spend the day downtown wandering through Pike Place Market. I don't remember why we decided to walk to the bookstore, but it was probably just that I'd lived here for something like a year and hadn't actually been there yet -- which seems so ridiculous to me now, because I'd never let a year pass between visits now.

I've heard people compare it to Powell's, but that doesn't really work for me. I mean, I love Powell's. The first time I visited Powell's I was so overwhelmed I nearly hyperventilated. Matt and I are incapable of walking out of Powell's without at least one grocery bag full of books. Powell's pretty much wins as far as the scope of their selection, and I won't bother to try to explain what it's like to go there because this entry is about the Elliott Bay Book Company and it is a totally different experience. They're not the same at all. They're both amazing, but they're not the same. I've bought dozens of books at the EBBC over the years, but it's not just about that. It's not just about supporting independent bookstores or the fact that I can find what Barnes and Noble and Borders don't have. It's also about the creaky wood floors, and the beautiful handmade journals by the entrance (my husband has bought a few of those for me). It's about sitting in the cafe downstairs, making reading lists and writing lesson plans. Once I sat down there for a few hours working on one poem, fueled by two or three cups of coffee. It's about being in love with language and writers and sentences and the way paper feels in my hand. It's about walking out into the world afterwards with whatever I've bought -- Joan Didion's collected essays or a signed copy of Special Topics in Calamity Physics or Sherman Alexie's new book of poetry -- and feeling like I've discovered one of the millions of keys to the meaning of life.

I was on the hiring committee at school when we hired my friend Becca as our new addition to the English department. It was actually a phone interview since she was in New York at the time, but even though I wouldn't meet her in person for several more weeks I remember it more than I've remembered any other interview. I mean, obviously, I liked her enough over the phone to advocate for hiring her. She would probably like to believe I thought we should hire her because she sounded like a competent, knowledgeable English teacher. And obviously, she must have; she answered all the standard teacher interview questions and the committee agreed to offer her the job, but what I remember is the fact that she'd worked at the Elliott Bay Book Company and could talk with great passion and excitement about actual books she'd read. Because truth be told, while I suppose it's important to be able to talk about how you handle discipline in your classroom and your knowledge of standards and curriculum and all that other eduspeak, teachers know how they're supposed to answer those questions. Those may be the mark of a competent teacher, but the mark of a great teacher is whether or not she can convey a passion for books and storytelling and really amazing sentences. Becca spoke about John Steinbeck that day, and I didn't think of lesson plans; I thought of those little cards in the stacks at the bookstore, the ones written by the people who work there proclaiming their love of these books to the world and explaining why you should read them, too. This is the kind of passion we need in the classroom. I don't know if everyone who works at the Elliott Bay Book Company feels that connection with books and words and ideas and cares about sharing them with people -- I'm going to pretend they do -- but Becca definitely did. She still does.

I was there a little over three months ago, when I was very, very pregnant. It was my last significant outing before going into labor, and more than once that afternoon I really wondered if I was going to make it through the weekend before meeting my baby. Matt found a parking spot practically around the corner, and it was all I could do to waddle very, very slowly between the car and the bookstore. I wandered the stacks for less time than I normally did simply because walking at all had become so uncomfortable. I dropped a few hints for Christmas presents (including signed copies of Too Much Happiness by Alice Munro and The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver, both of which my husband picked up for me), but I didn't want that trip to be my last. I was simply too preoccupied to make it worthwhile, to really absorb it.

But it turns out that I didn't really absorb it this time, either. As soon as we walked in the door, I promptly forgot about noticing everything for the last! time! and just did my usual thing. I suppose that's part of what makes it so special, though -- the fact that I am so quickly absorbed, that I forget everything else for a little while. Suzannah and her daddy made a beeline for the children's section and Isaac and I headed for the fiction, where I picked up and reluctantly replaced at least a dozen books I wanted. We browsed through the poetry section, where I immediately grabbed White Apples and the Taste of Stone: Selected Poems by Donald Hall. (It seemed fitting, somehow. When I was pregnant with Suzannah, my birthday present from Matt was a copy of Jane Kenyon's Collected Poems; he bought that at Bailey Coy Books on Capitol Hill, a place we used to love to duck into when we were childless young things wandering around Broadway on Saturday afternoons. Bailey Coy, sadly, has closed, and I can't remember whether or not we ever went back after he bought me that book of poetry. So, I don't know, it seemed kind of fitting that my last purchase from Elliott Bay Books where it stands now would be a selections of her husband's poetry, including poems from Without, a collection dedicated to Kenyon.) It was a completely ordinary and therefore totally lovely visit; had I paused to consider that it was our last one I might have bought more of the dozen or so books I really, really wanted but managed to talk myself out of because a.) I have plenty of books at home to read, b.) I also have a baby and a preschooler and I'm still learning how to work my own reading time back into my life, and c.) oh, yeah, I'm not actually earning any money right now, so I am trying to be very careful about spending it.

My knee-jerk reaction, when I heard of the move, was pretty much sheer despair. I don't feel that way anymore. I think it really could be a great and necessary move (The Stranger makes a pretty compelling case for it), and obviously, the survival of bookstores doesn't depend on my emotional attachment to a particular place.

But I'm still going to miss it.