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Ode to a Bookstore
It was a glorious year
A little over five years ago, having just been laid off from my job after two decades, I had the following brief conversation with one of my daughters:
Me: “Is it crazy to be thinking about opening a bookstore?”
Her: “No crazier than talking about it your whole life and never doing it.”
And a child shall lead them.
I found myself remembering this conversation, and the bookstore that resulted from it, while pondering a writing challenge on the Vocal Media site called (No)Regrets. That challenge is about an embarrassing or cringeworthy experience in your past, and this is neither of those. But until very recently there were regrets about The Last Word Bookstore, my life-long dream that opened in 2016 and blazed across the sky for just over one glorious year.
That the store did not survive is not particularly shocking in itself; this happens with a lot of new businesses of all types in the first five years, not just bookstores. That didn’t lessen the sense of loss, however, and I admit that I struggled for a long time afterward. Even worse was the fact that I lost my sister less than a year after the store closed. It was a dark time.
The store’s demise was, in retrospect, a perfect storm of both foreseeable and unforeseeable…
