Birding with Yeats: A Mother's Memoir Read Online Free PDF

and he was my boss. So I guess we’d had some practice in these roles, however long ago it was.
    Eventually, I became manager at the Book City on the Danforth. When I left to have the baby a customer said to me, “Don’t quit work and jeopardize your career. Don’t lose yourself.” I guess that had happened to her, but my wage at Book City would have covered daycare and not much else, so I didn’t even consider staying. Now that I was contemplating working again, the bookseller inside me was hopping with anticipation. I really did belong in a bookstore.
    In the months leading up to the grand opening, I sometimes resented the near-constant companionship at home (which is crazy to think about now, when Ben works double shifts all week long and I almost never see him). I was used to having the house to myself and found sharing it with Ben an adjustment. Not that he was a disagreeable companion; just that he was there. I was reminded of my Uncle Dick who, on his first day of retirement, came downstairs to find a brown paper bag on the kitchen counter.
    “What’s this?” he asked my aunt.
    “Your lunch,” she said. “You’re not hanging around the house all day.”
    By the summer, Ben had hired some staff, including Rupert and Danielle. We now had a basement office at the shop, which was fixed with desks and lots of metal shelving. The kids, along with a full-time employee, Lisa, started creating title cards on the computer system and receiving boxes of books. They had to unpack the boxes to make sure all the books were there, match the orders to the invoices, and pack the books up again until we could place them on the shelves upstairs. Upstairs was still under construction.
    Over the Labour Day weekend, we engaged the help of family and friends to stock the shelves of the brand-new bookstore. It was very exciting for everyone. People picked their sections: our friend Mary chose to shelve kids’ books; June and Johanna covered the biographies; Sarah and Fiona did hardcover fiction. Yeats and his friends started with the humour section and moved on to travel. Everywhere people were opening boxes, moving shelves around, and standing back to look at their handiwork. By the end of the weekend, we were exhausted but glowing with satisfaction. We were ready for business.
    THAT FIRST FALL WE had two big parties in the store on back-to-back nights. We wanted to celebrate the grand opening of the shop with everyone we knew and we wanted to show our publishing friends that the store would be a good space for their parties. Eventually, we’d have not only book launches in the store, but weddings, showers, retirement parties, a play, even my mother’s eightieth birthday party. The space began to take on a patina of worn charm.
    But in the early days everything was new and shiny. People walked in and gawked at the beautiful chandeliers and bookcases, and every time I was there a customer would say something like, “This is a real sanctuary on Bay Street.” “Bay Street” is synonymous with material wealth and success, but also with the rat race and with stress, something the shop’s ambiance seemed to counteract. We had the feeling right, we had the book selection right, and now we just needed about a thousand more regular customers to make it a viable operation.
    To that end, Ben started accepting every bookselling opportunity, be it holding an event in the store or hauling boxes of books to sell around town. We agreed to sell books for Random House at Word on the Street, the annual outdoor book festival that took place at Queen’s Park at the end of September. This was where Yeats had his first taste of bookselling, and he loved it. He came with us to set up, piling books on the tables in the hopes of watching those stacks slowly shrink over the course of the day. He stayed all day without complaint and I remember thinking that it was in the blood, this bookselling, this willingness to stand around all day and talk