The Title Wave Used Bookstore

The Title Wave Used Bookstore.-- Photo by Nancy W. Woods

There’s something so comforting, so unassuming, about discarded and used books. With their tattered covers, torn pages and affectionate inscriptions written to unknown readers, they seem to offer all that is good about books while, at the same time, remaining unpretentious.

Every once in a while, to give myself a break from life’s trendy newness, I stop by the The Title Wave Used Bookstore, here in Portland, Oregon. Housed in a 1912 Spanish Renaissance Revival building, the store is filled with thousands of books, CDs, videos, tapes, maps, music and magazines that have been pulled from the shelves of the Multnomah County Library. Run mostly by volunteers, the store features an imposing front door; high, arched windows; and shelves and shelves of affordable books. Since the inventory is constantly changing, there’s no way of knowing quite what to expect.

When I stopped by the other day, the first thing I noticed was a signed copy of Cult of Power: Sex Discrimination in Corporate America and What Can Be Done About It by Martha Burk ($5). The book was inscribed “To Judy – Women will change the world! Martha Burk.”

Nearby, sat a paperback copy of Just Desserts: A Bed-And-Breakfast Mystery by Mary Daheim, with a price tag of 75 cents.

Amused and encouraged by the juxtaposition of political outrage and pure escapism, I headed to the Talking Books for Adults section, where I spotted a four-cassette set of Accent English for Russian Speakers ($1) and an eight-cassette set of Welcome to Temptation by Jennifer Crusie, described on the cover as a “delicious tale of scandal, gossip, and murder in a small town called Temptation.”

In keeping with the store’s free-thinking, open-minded mix of the silly and serious, classic and pop, practical and esoteric, its shelves included everything from outdated, $.25-copies of The New Yorker to a long-playing record of Vikki Carr’s called Don’t Break My Pretty Balloon ($.10); G. Schirmer’s Collection of Opera Librettos: Don Giovanni, Opera in Two Acts, Music by W.A. Mozart (in Italian and English) ($.01); and a hardcover copy of Danielle Steel’s The Kiss ($2).

Pittman’s map of Harney County ($.25) was shelved not far from Sensational Sex in 7 Easy Steps: The Proven Plan for Enhancing Your Sexual Function and Achieving Optimum Health by Ridwan Shabsigh, MD ($2).

Torn between buying an 1884 copy of Diary and Correspondence of Samuel Pepys, Esq. F.R.S., Vol. V, April 1, 1665-April 8, 1666 ($15) or Dear Juliette: Letters of May Sarton to Juliette Huxley, edited by Susan Sherman ($3), I settled, instead, on something even better, a spiral-bound blank book made from the covers of a 46-year-old copy of Theory and Practice of Presswork: United States Government Printing Office Training Series.

Then, feeling once again renewed and ready to face the brand-new world, I headed back out the door, armed with a sense of history and the comforting feeling that, for me at least, can only come from handling old books.

The Title Wave Used Bookstore
216 N.E. Knott St.
Portland, Oregon 97212
(503) 988-5021
www.multcolib.org/titlewave/

Trying too hard to lighten up

Several months ago, I took a writing-for-the-radio class. During one session, I practiced recording “Lighten Up Already,” an essay about how I think people should lighten up.

The recording didn’t go well. I was finding it difficult to lighten up and come across as my naturally funny self, because, the whole time I was speaking into the microphone, the instructor’s Labradoodle (a dark-haired Labrador/poodle mix) was running around the small room, chewing on a squeaky dog toy and, every so often, humping me and the other students, who included a Jewish woman who’d written a piece about what it felt like to have a Christmas tree during the holiday season and a woman who’d written about her trip to Southeast Asia.

“What’s the matter? You sound angry,” the instructor kept asking me, as I tried a second recording and then a third. “Try to come across as flabbergasted and vulnerable,” the teacher insisted, as her large, untrained mutt continued to run and hump and squeak.

Looking back

You don't have to look very far to find a magazine article promising to tell you how to become a writer. In my case, however, the route was anything but straight.

Fall in love with reading

I started reading at the age of four or five. I spent much of those years sitting on the kitchen floor, slowly sounding out the words in my pink-covered reading book. Nearby, my mother would be washing the dishes. Whenever I came across a word I didn’t understand, I would do my best to pronounce it and my mother would tell me what it meant. Even at that age, I knew reading was a key to worlds I might otherwise never visit. If I could just figure out the secret, I would get in.

Be a bookworm

As a child growing up in Fairbanks, Alaska, I spent most of my time reading. I was particularly drawn toward pathetic stories about poor, fatherless families who enjoyed making each other Christmas gifts out of nothing more than bits of used string. I read Little Women in the overhead cab of my father’s camper, read Daddy Longlegs in the bow of my father’s boat, read The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew in our cabin at Harding Lake.

I gulped books whole, choked them down fast, gobbled down one only to swallow another. I checked books out of the George C. Thomas Memorial Library, bringing them home a bicycle basketful at a time. The library was housed in a log building down by the Chena River, a matronly, broad-hipped building that wore its front porch like a skirt. Inside, way in back, on the other side of the adult section, was a small set of stairs that led to a tiny landing where the children’s books were kept. It was up there while all alone, kneeling before the bookshelves that I made my choices, my coarse hair almost brushing the tin ceiling.

Be curious.

When I left home to go to college at the age of seventeen, I had only two goals, to become a medical technologist and get an apartment. My worst fear was I would die with other cities being nothing more than dots on a map. I wanted to expose myself to new ideas and cultures and people.

Eventually, I got a job as a med tech, but after several years of drawing, spinning, mixing, pouring and pipetting by mouth other people's bodily fluids, I woke up one day scared shitless that I was going to spend the rest of my life drawing, spinning, mixing, pouring and pipetting by mouth other people's bodily fluids, when I wasn’t barely paying my rent or bleaching other people’s blood out of my five white uniforms. So I quit.

Have an inexplicable, life-changing moment

Over the years, I delivered mail, took wedding photos and sold (legal) drugs, but nothing seemed to stick, so it isn’t all that surprising that one day while sitting on the floor of my barely furnished, no-bedroom apartment ― a ground-floor studio with a broken toilet and non-functioning TV ― I pulled out the portable Olivetti my parents gave me for leaving home. I’ve been writing between naps ever since.

Cute kids

As the editor of a community newspaper, my job occasionally involves taking photos, so early one recent morning I drove to a building not far from my house to take photos for an article about a Montessori school.

The lighting inside the school was pleasantly dim and the children unusually calm, a result of the natural lighting, the director explained.

I’m the mother of a 20-year-old, so it had been a while since I’d been around children so young, in this case, infants through age six. All around me, cute, curly-haired kids, some still rubbing sleep from their eyes, were reading books and wielding pretend hammers.

Stocking footed, I stepped into a classroom where I stooped low to take a photo of one youngster sucking her thumb while sitting in her teacher’s lap.

In a few minutes I had all the photos I needed, including some that I would never run but that reminded of how cute kids can be, with their tossled hair, runny noses and bare rumps.

Sleeping with Poe

“Now that’s a room!” my daughter Holly said as she walked into the Edgar Allan Poe room with its stuffed raven perched on the bureau and the pendulum-like scythe hanging over the brocade-covered bed. With its dark woodwork and red-velvet drapes, the hotel room looked like a scene out of “The Pit and the Pendulum” with a bit of “The Raven” thrown in.

Holly and I had come to the Sylvia Beach Hotel with its author-themed rooms for a mother-daughter vacation on the Oregon Coast.

“E. B. White is booked, but Jane Austen is available,” the reservation clerk told me when I called to book my room. E. B. White was my first choice. I’ve been a fan of White’s ever since I was a grad student and came across a collection of his humorous essays in a used-book store just off the University of Oregon campus.

But, as the clerk said, E. B. White was booked; and I’d already booked Poe for Holly, so when I found out the Austen room sat next door to the Poe room, I booked Jane for myself. That room included a small writing desk, stuffed chair, double bed with flowered bedspread and lace curtains.

Holly and I arrived in the small town of Newport in the middle of the afternoon. After parking in the nearby lot, we walked across the cobble-stoned street to the green, three-story, shingled hotel with its white picket fence and small garden.

The minute I stepped inside the pleasantly ramshackle hotel, I immediately felt at home. Unpretentious to the extreme, Sylvia Beach boasts uneven floors, wobbly lamps and two resident cats but no elevator, which meant Holly and I had to haul our suitcases to the third floor, where we checked out the cozy library with its fireplace and comfortable chairs.

Before dinner that night, we wandered up and down the halls, peeking into the unoccupied rooms. Holly got a kick out of the whimsical Dr. Seuss room, while I found myself wanting to move into the Emily Dickinson room, a spacious corner room set in the back.

That evening, Holly and I joined several of the other guests in the dining room to eat, visit and play a game called Two Truths and a Lie, in which everyone is asked to come up with two true stories and one untrue one about themselves. The trick was to try to fool everyone else.

I said I’d been to Denmark (true), had worked as a medical technologist (true) and had shot a moose (not true). Holly said she and her dad once got stuck in some sand while driving in the John Day Fossil Beds (true); knew how to play the violin, piano and guitar (true); and was valedictorian of her high-school class (close, but no cigar).

Neither Holly nor I fooled anyone, unlike the other guests, including a woman who said she once met Johnny Wisemiller―the actor who played Tarzan―and got his signature (true), hosted her own TV advice show (true) and played guard on a basketball team that won the state playoffs (not true).

Goody, the friendly owner of the hotel, told us several stories about herself, including one about a man she once knew who asked her to pretend to be his fiancé because he’d told his dying grandmother he was getting married (true); and another one about how, to surprise a friend on her 50th birthday, Goody stole the friend’s address book and used it to contact 50 men whom she asked to stop by the friend’s house and give her a kiss (true – 47 of the men showed up, including the woman’s Volvo repairman).

At the Sylvia Beach Hotel, I learned that night, telling stories is a highly valued form of entertainment.

Over the next couple of days, Holly and I met several of the other guests, including a freelance writer from San Francisco and a woman on sabbatical who’d come to the hotel to write.

During our stay, we did venture out long enough to visit the Yaquina Bay Lighthouse and check out the Old Bayfront Bazaar with its seashell jewelry boxes, seashell coasters and seashell coin purses. We even stopped by the Pirate’s Cove shopping area where we took pictures of ourselves standing in front of the pirate statues before having lunch (shrimp stew and clam chowder) and walking along the bay with is smelly crab nets and barking seals.

But it was inside the hotel, with its reading lamps, used books and photos of everyone from Kurt Vonnegut to W. B. Yeats, that we really relaxed.

On our last evening, Holly and I stayed up late playing the board game Balderdash (in you have to come up with word definitions) before adjourning to my room where we stretched out on the bed to read together. Holly flipped through pages of Cosmo Girl while I enjoyed a biography of Jane Austen, a copy of which I found in the room.

Experiencing the comfort of trees

“You’re permeable to your surroundings,” a neighbor of mine once said after I told her how difficult it was for me to work in a busy newspaper office, with dozens of people around me, the phone ringing, and the police scanner announcing the next house fire or traffic accident.

That job was short-lived. I now work by myself.

My whole self is influenced by where I am. When I’m in the city, everything, my thoughts and feelings, my writing, how I interact with the world, are, to a certain degree, shaped by the sharp edges of the buildings and severe angles of the streets.

In contrast, when I’m in the country, I become softer, rounder, more sensual, more organic and complex. When surrounded by nature, my writing projects seem to begin and end more naturally, reflecting the gently sloping hills and waving trees.

In some ways, if I’m not in the country, I don’t feel like I’m really me. It’s there that I relax and open up, become less intellectual, more spiritual and reconnect with whatever it is that I lose sight of in the city.

Which explains why, every so often, armed with a cup of coffee, I play hooky and head out of town, to experience the comforting presence of trees. While there, driving this way and that down the curving roads, it feels as if the trees are brushing the air and me clean, as if, like green filters, they’re scrubbing away all that’s unnecessary and not me.

There’s something about the strong, silent presence of trees that makes me feel like I don’t have to be doing anything. Sure-footed and undemanding, trees provide a strong consistency. Their branches have a muffling effect on sounds and my thoughts, setting me above my concept of myself; their overhead canopy feels soothing.

Reaching high while digging deep, trees solve so much with their calm presence, as they march up the side of a hill, anchor the edge of a field or just stand there skirted by thick undergrowth.

Deep rooted and stalwart, they encompass me with their arms and bless me with their indifference to life’s successes and failures. “Everything is all right,” they seem to be saying, while swaying in life’s breeze.

Redhead

A few weeks ago, I went to Oregon Home magazine’s 10-year anniversary party.

“I thought you’d have red hair!” Sheila, the editor, said upon seeing me for the first time.

Until that moment, although I’d been writing for Sheila for several years, we’d never actually met.

“Wait. Let me get used to your face,” she said while forming a frame with her hands.

I’d seen photos of Sheila in the magazine, so had some idea of what to expect although, in person, she is even more attractive, more exotic looking. She also has a calming presence, a result, perhaps, of having to herd a lot of freelance writers, including me.

“I wasn’t expecting brunette,” she shouted over the sound of a man singing Jimmy Buffett songs and the chatter of the other partiers.

The odd thing was, until two days prior, I had been a redhead. Then, in one of those oh-what-the-heck moods, I had my hair stylist apply a heavy dose of dark hair color onto my locks. In addition to being an editor, could Sheila also be psychic?

Of all my editors, Sheila is one of my favorites. At the party she not only acknowledged I wrote for other publications before encouraging me to “Keep sending ME your good essays,” but she also made sure I got something to eat and asked if I’d found a writer’s getaway cabin. (No, not yet.) After talking with me for several minutes, she let me go with a “Well, no doubt you’re tired,” a response to an earlier email of mine in which I said I might not make the party because, depending on how the work day went, I sometimes turned into a pumpkin by 7 p.m.

As I headed out of the noisy party room and into the dark night, making my way down a rain-glistened city sidewalk to my car, for the first time I realized something that, in the flurry of making a living, I sometimes forget ― that, in addition to being a coworker, an editor can also be a friend.