On the marketplace

At the post office, no A. working for the second day in a row. I asked if he was on vacation. 

“Yeah, he’ll be back on Monday,” A.’s stand-in said as he placed a label on my package.  “It’s funny, everyone’s been asking that.”

No offense to this guy, but any time you walk into the post office and don’t see A. behind the desk, it’s a disappointment. A. is a steady presence, cheerful, quick to laugh, and we’ve discovered we have an overlap in our taste of books. I have held up the line before discussing books like The Other Valley by Scott Alexander Howard and The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar and The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden.

Mostly we don’t get to choose our neighbors. When making the decision to purchase this particular bookstore, it would never have occurred to me that I would be spending a lot of time at the post office, mailing books around the country, and so I never would have thought to see if I got along with the people who worked there. (And would I have opted not to buy the bookstore if I didn’t?)

I think about books that people read because they become invested in the communities of characters like Louise Penny’s Inspector Gamache series and its town of Three Pines. We have our own little Three Pines in Beverly Farms.

Working in corporate America, those communities are more manufactured. Its workers are handpicked and often end up having the same backgrounds, the same educations. It has a been a happy surprise to discover the Beverly Farms community and to get to know the people who live and work here. Yes, we operate in a marketplace, but I see our place in that marketplace every day and the value each business and each person to brings to one another and it makes me work that much harder.