I had four hours until my plane rumbled down the runway and flung itself into the clear Arizona sky and I had no place to be. I found myself wandering down Mill Street in Tempe, right on the edge of the Arizona State University campus, browsing the local boutiques and gift shops and waiting for a scent to catch my appetite and draw me into one of the local eateries. I almost walked past the bookstore. A stack of books on the sidewalk caught my eye and I instinctively stopped and started reading. I moved in the direction of the door and then I hesitated and reminded myself of the new rule. Don't buy anymore books. I can check them out of the library, I can borrow them from friends, and if it is absolutely necessary that I must read it before I can find a copy to borrow, then I may buy an electronic copy. Full of disappointment, I turned and walked about ten feet down the sidewalk before I remembered that I am the one who made up this rule and therefore I have the authority to ignore it. I abruptly turned and dove into the bookstore before the disciplined part of my brain could tell me to stop.
Used books have a very distinct scent. The scent of paste and ink has worn away and what is left is the scent of people living their lives. I took a deep breath and savored the scent of decades old paper while I tried to imagine what these books must have seen. These books had probably stared into the face of a young woman sunning herself on the beach while her boyfriend slept next to her, an anxiety ridden husband waiting in a surgery waiting room for news of his wife's progress, a grandmother swinging placidly on a porch swing while her dinner simmered on the stove, a sharp witted barista waiting for her next customer to come walking through the door, a tenderhearted adolescent pretending to read in the school library while he stole glances at the girl that he knew he had just fallen in love with. These books carried stories beyond the ones that were written on their pages and I felt a connection to all of the unknown people that were a part of those stories as a stood in the doorway of the shop.
As I acclimated to the inside of this spirited yet sleepy den, I wondered if it was possible that I was the only person here. The shop was no more than twenty feet wide and in addition to the floor to ceiling shelves that lined the walls, there were also several stacks and racks and bins of books lined up in precarious rows through the middle of the shop. Several small carpet runners were positioned in a path through the store, designating the space where books were not to be placed if anyone was ever to see the back of the store ever again. I weaved my way down this path with no idea what I was looking for or how I was going to find it, when a voice called to me from somewhere out of site. Behind a counter that I had mistaken for a stack of books sat a white haired man with a beard that reminded me of the mountains and several silver feathers and beads hanging from leather strings around his neck. With his hands tucked into his front vest pockets he called out to me to see if he could help me find something. I replied that I was just looking around and he responded by asking me where I was from. After a short exchange, he knew that I was from Indianapolis and in town for work and I knew that he knew a lot about his books and that they were organized by category if I wanted to try to locate something myself. I thanked him and moved deeper into the store where I quickly made note that the section labels were all variations of what any other bookstore would label as "History." There was a section for US History, World History, Arizona History, Native American History, Generals, Historical Figures, Wars. As I concentrated on the titles in front of me a second voice floated over the top of one of the center stacks. I peered around the corner to see a woman who was probably about thirty years younger than the man at the counter but still old enough to be my mother. She asked me for details of my work and travels while she sprayed an aerosol air freshener on the carpets at her feet. I pleasantly engaged her in conversation, halfway relieved to be pulled away from the overwhelming collection of events and people that I had never heard of sitting on the shelves behind me.
On the fresh air side of the shop I found a six foot wide shelf titled Fiction. I scanned the titles looking for something obscure to read on the plane. I'm not allowed to buy books so this one had to be something I couldn't get elsewhere. The man behind the counter must have sensed that I had entered a place in my head where excessive inputs had rendered me unable to make decisions. He strode across the store, navigating the piles like the coyote I had watched bound down the rocky slope of the South Kitchen Mountain earlier that morning, very obviously in familiar terrain and sure of every step. Before I noticed it was there, he sunk into an easy chair that was also disguised as a pile of books and then he deftly picked out a book for me from the pile immediately in front of him. What he chose was a mystery novel that was set on the Navajo Indian Reservation in Northern Arizona. The story branches out of a real-life plane crash that occurred over the Grand Canyon in the 1950s. He explained to me that it would be a fun read for my trip back home and that I would learn a lot about Arizona and the Navajo. He told me the author was from Flagstaff and that he had such a close relationship with members of the tribe that they made him an honorary Navajo shortly before his death. I had visited Flagstaff several years prior and my only memories are of the odd and entertaining interactions with the people who call that sleepy little railroad stop home. I pictured the author as a man seated in a faded lawn chair on the side of a road with a basket of hand made trinkets for sale at his side. He was waiting for a tourist to stop not so he could sell his wares but so that he could tell them the story of the time someone tried to build a gas station at the edge of that stand of pine trees, but through a series of mildly unfortunate and mostly comical events, they ended up building a self-serve laundry mat instead. Suddenly I couldn't think of anything I would rather read and so I agreed to buy the book. As we traveled back towards the front of the store together, I asked if he had any Kurt Vonnegut. He told me that he couldn't keep Vonnegut in the store, it sells too quickly. He said he would probably be able to hang on to it for a little longer if he priced it a little higher, but he didn't really see the point in that.
After some complication involving acceptable form of payment and a quick trip to an ATM, I had purchased the book. While I waited for my change, the white haired man asked me what I did for a living. I gave him my standard answer, "I am a Construction Project Manager," and then he guessed correctly that I was a trained Civil Engineer. My interest immediately shifted from the stack of books that I had been poking through to the white haired man with his hands dug back into his front vest pocket. Clearly he had no intention of giving me my change anytime soon, not that I was in any hurry to leave his presence at this point. He knew when I walked in that I wouldn't be able to pick out a book, he knew what kind of book I would like, he knew that I don't pay enough attention to my surroundings to reject the idea of reading a book about a mid-air plane collision while on a plane. I asked him how he knew what I had studied and he told me that he used to teach at the University. He launched into the story of his teaching career as if this somehow answered the question of how he seemed to know so much about a lady from 700 miles away who almost walked past his shop on a meaningless Friday afternoon. I soon forgot that I was perplexed and found myself drawn into his story.
The white haired man was a professor of US History. When he started teaching the Civil War was fifty years in the past and when he retired it was one hundred. He had taught more students history than any person in the United States. This was mostly due to the length of his tenure, but also due to the fact that he chose to teach entry level classes with hundreds of students even after his tenure would have granted him the privilege of smaller graduate level courses. He talked about how he loved to teach but hated to grade, and that after fifty years he finally had decided that the tediousness of grading outweighed the joy of teaching. He also expressed that he would love to be around for the US tricentennial and that he had challenged his students to locate the allegedly-deceased Harry Houdini in order to adjust time to make this possible. He didn't seem to have much hope that they would be able to pull this off. The idea of adjustments to the time continuum didn't seem to be the issue, more that he seemed to genuinely believe that Harry Houdini is in fact dead as reported. Telling me about the history of his bookshop seemed to remind him that we were conducting a transaction and he hand wrote my bill of sale and counted my change out of the register while he described the people who had worked there over the years. Included in his list of former employees were his daughter and son in-law, who had somehow managed to pay their way through University with wages earned working in his shop. He explained that he hoped to make money doing this someday. I thought back to his Kurt Vonnegut pricing strategy and hoped along with him. This hope quickly faded as he started to hand me my change for the second time and I had to remind him that he had already given it to me. He mentioned that this might be why he doesn't make any money. I politely agreed.
Having my change, my purchase, my hand written bill of sale, a card with the address and phone number of his shop in hand, I felt nothing compelling me to make an exit. Instead I asked him what his favorite era in US History was. I'm not sure why, given my experience up to this point, but I expected a rather straightforward answer. Instead he told me that he had once written an article about a historian from Indiana named John Clark Ridpath. The story started with Ridpath being instrumental in changing the name of DePauw University from its original name and ended with a theory that Ridpath and James WhItcomb Riley may have been secret lovers. In between, there was a tale of a Methodist minister who wasn't very good a church politics, door to door sales tactics for getting people to subscribe to a world history book sold in several volumes, and a tale of the current French president sneaking out at night on a motorbike much to the frustration of his security detail. It was a whirlwind and I wanted to ask why this was his favorite era, but I wasn't sure that it even classified as an era and so I held my question. I thought about it afterwards and wondered if my question was one that wasn't worth asking, similar to a starlet being asked by a late night TV show host who she is currently dating. Rather than answering my question, he chose to talk about something that he knew I would enjoy listening to.
I noted that this was probably one of the more interesting conversations that I had participated in since I arrived in Arizona and I thanked him for that. He responded that he always meant to write an autobiography but had never gotten around to it. In the manner that could only be adopted by a person who has learned the art of graceful acceptance, he told me that he probably would never write one at this point and then he wished me a safe trip home. Before I left I asked him to write his name on the bookstore card so that I may look up his article when I returned home. I was genuinely pleased to learn that I had made the acquaintance of Chris Smith - father, retired professor, lover of obscure Indiana history and Native American culture, amateur time traveler, and advocate of expanding the world population of books and knowledge by any means necessary. I wandered back out of his store into the Tempe sunshine, happy to be carrying my new used book in my arms and happy to be carrying a piece of the Chris Smith autobiography in my soul.
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