daily prompt

A Traveler’s Tale

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

He was a writer, that much he made certain I knew. A poet.

I never looked for his book online or in a bookstore. He showed it to me, or he showed me a galley proof of it. And now, more than a decade later, I do not remember his name or enough about the book to find out whatever happened to him or it.

The two of us were passengers on a plane, and 98% of my personal air travel history dates from the years 2000 to 2004, when I moved from upstate New York to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and twice a year I returned home for holiday visits. The typical route was: Eastern Iowa Airport to Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport to Stewart International Airport (or sometimes Logan in Boston), because there are no direct flights between Iowa and anyplace else I have ever lived. The book author was a wadded-up sheet of paper’s direct flight across the aisle from me.
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In Honor of #IndependentBookstoreDay

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

April 28, 2018, is Independent Bookstore Day. For most of the 1990s, I was employed in an independent bookstore in New Paltz, New York. If you are a fan of books and of locally owned businesses and live near an independent bookstore, any excuse to visit your local bookstore is a good reason to visit it.

(Especially booksellers that specialize in used books; the perfume of used books ought to be bottled and sold, but then again, it already is: in old books.)

Huffington Post last year published a list of fifty popular independent bookstores located across the country; I have been in three of the fifty (numbers 4, 13, and 28) and number 28 has employed and still employs co-workers from my old bookseller.

A column of mine from 2015:
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Hometowns

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

One of the unique things that is somehow common to many people (we are all alike in our uniqueness) is a stated belief that our hometown is no place special. We are taught to be humble, so anyplace that our humble selves hail from must be thought of as not all that special, either.

This often masks a fierce inner secret belief that one’s hometown is in fact the best place to be from and (insert name of a higher power one believes in here), please help those who chose to be born somewhere else, especially those unlucky ones born in the nearest next neighboring town. Those people are the unluckiest of all, perhaps because they were born so near to our town’s obvious greatness but they were not, which renders all the more dramatic their failure at their life’s first and easiest task: pick the right place to be born.
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