Surprises Along the Way

Maile surprises me with an early birthday present. I don’t know what we are doing or where we are going, but after we close and lock up the book shop, she ushers me through the rainy streets, two blocks to our favorite Indian restaurant, Himalayan.

The place is a refuge against the cold, the December dark, and the rain that feels like it should be snow. We shiver and take off our coats and the hostess leads us to a table at the window framed by colorful Christmas lights. It is set for four people.

“Four?” I ask, smiling.

“It’s a surprise,” Maile says.

So we take our seats and look over the menu (though I know exactly what I’m going to get, the same thing every time, shrimp vindaloo extra hot with a peshwari naan) and wait to see who’s joining us.

Then, bustling in out of the cold, Nate and Lore Wilbert appear and there are hugs and laughs and then we’re at a table for four talking books and Indian food and how Lancaster is treating some of her newest residents. Moving and life and dogs and the book shop and coffee shops Nate prefers to work at and Lore’s new study.

We get the check and continue talking on and on. We stand and put on our coats and we’re still talking, not going anywhere.

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After the meal, Maile smiles and says she has another surprise. We’re going to see Squirrel Nut Zippers, performing right there in Lancaster at The Ware Center.

The theater seats around 300 people, and when they come in and play their brass and strings and jaunty piano, I’m taken back to when we first listened to them, 25 years ago, newly married and living far from anyone we knew. Jacksonville became home to us, though it was a foreign land, so hot, so humid, and just the two of us, trying to figure out what a marriage might look like.

There were really good times and hard conversations, milkshakes and Scrabble every single night, lazy Saturdays with no kids, no work to do, no one to go see. Just the two of us in a kind of Garden of Eden, with tiny lizards and azaleas everywhere, bright splashes of color, literally counting our dollars on Saturday evenings to see if we had enough to go out to eat at the local Outback, or if instead it was a $15 grocery run to the Food Lion.

There were sweet nights, the newness of sleeping in the same bed, and reading books out loud to one another: Watership Down and The Chronicles of Narnia. We had no close friends within a thousand miles. We held on to each other.

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Owning a book shop during Christmas is a whirlwind of events and book orders and wondering with some trepidation how slow January will be. And there are kids’ Christmas concerts to go to, and holiday meals, and a dog who split her nail and ended up anesthetized at the vet so they could file it down to the nub and then wrap it so it would heal.

But sometimes you have to stop. Sometimes you have to stop and just sit in the light of the Christmas tree, recovering dog lying at your feet, children making their way to bed. I guess there is a silent night somewhere, in the midst of it all.

Our little books shop, Nooks, is now on Bookshop.org, so if you want to buy your books online you can support us by visiting our bookstore and then buying your books at Bookshop!

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This week I have the honor of being on Tsh Oxenreider’s podcast, A Drink With a Friend. We talk about Maile and I’s first eight months as book shop owners, the people we meet there, and how we’re trying to make it work with a family of eight. I always love my chats with Tsh.