Drama, Drama, Book Sale

Our little town of Pendleton, Oregon, is famous for its rodeo—but the RoundUp is not the annual event that goes on my calendar. That honor is reserved for the Pendleton Library’s annual book sale.

I can’t think of any concert or rally or Black Friday sale that I’d stand in line for, but for the book sale, I was waiting for the doors to open. Chatting with the ladies behind me in line, we noted that you could spot the veteran book-salers by the empty bags we shouldered. (The only thing missing from this book sale is a cat. Every great bookstore has a cat! I could have supplied one, if they allowed a cat-on-leash in the Convention Center…)

We’d already had a very disrupted morning. When Jon was doing his morning walk and early “patrol” through our RV park, he caught sight of some folks, heading into the showers, who ran up some red flags. Top of that list of flags: they were carrying a lot of bags. Our experience has led us to suspect that someone carrying baggage is not someone who’s staying in the park. And however we might like to help (some) people out, our job here is to provide and preserve services for the folks who are paying to stay here. That said, we don’t want to make the mistake of a hostile approach if that person actually is staying here, so it’s a delicate business. Still… two hours after they disappeared together into the unisex bathroom, I decided to act on the red flags.

I walked down and rapped at the door, announced myself as housekeeping, and commented that they’d been in there for two hours. “Oh, we haven’t even been here an hour,” he countered through the door. “You went in there at 5:20,” I responded, then asked what site they were staying in.

Long pause.

“Twenty-eight.”

Jon and I looked at each other; there was no RV in site #28 this morning.

He said he’d be out “in a minute,” but the minutes dragged on. And on. And the shower ran on. And on.

He finally came out and tried to bluster through the situation, first claiming they’d stayed the night with a friend who lives here—but he was unable to come up with a name for the supposed friend. Then he said it was a coworker who’d given him the shower code and told him it was okay to come use it—but still no name of anyone on our books. He claimed they were staying in an RV park in a nearby town (as if they would have had to drive to Pendleton to shower, if that were the case).

When Jon informed him (in his scariest Army-guy tone) that they were committing criminal trespass and theft of services, the guy looked incredulous. “Don’t you think that’s a little extreme?” Well, no. People pay to stay here and use those facilities. It’s not a public restroom. And sorry to be harsh, but having unhomed people washing their clothes in the shower is not what people are paying to be around.

Ultimately the guy said he would go back in to grab their things and leave… but the shower kept running, and they still didn’t come back out.

It was finally the police officer we called who hustled them out, ran their IDs for warrants, and Trespassed them off the property. The woman came out with hands stained by pink hair dye (never mind the fluorescent sign on the mirror that says “No hair dye”), and our housekeeper has had to scrub with bleach to get it (mostly) out. Under the cops’ eyes, the pair walked away, down the street, with all their bags hung about them. Then, after the cruisers left, we saw them walk back toward the park and get into a truck parked on the street. Sure made us wonder what was in the truck, that they didn’t want the police to associate it with them!

All of that sure threw off our morning routine—Jon served up pumpkin pancakes (made from our own garden’s pumpkins!) at 8:30 instead of our usual six-ish, and then he had to scramble through the shower and into his yellow KOA shirt to go to work. (Not that he hadn’t been on duty since 5:20 when he spotted our interlopers…Just one example of why our boss’s experiment of switching us to hourly pay was very short-lived!)

But as for me, the book sale didn’t open till ten, so I had plenty of time to get down there for the doors opening. It wasn’t an Oklahoma Land Rush like you see in clips of Black Friday sales, but there may have been some speedy gliding toward people’s favorite tables…

I wandered through, trailing my fingers over spines, seeing book after book that I like, or that I want to read—and that I already have downloaded onto my iPad. Even before we bought our boat, I’d already been working on trimming down my physical library and curating a ROBUST collection in Apple Books. Planning to live in a sailboat, with space at a premium, I’ve been moving everything to the digital.

I will say, though, how much I love a paper book. (And I don’t care what they say, I damn well WILL judge a book by its cover.) Tomorrow I’ll go back for the sale’s final hours, where you can fill a BAG of books for $3. Officially that’s a purchase for the park’s little “lending library” in the laundry room… But some of those books will pass through my hands before they make it to the laundry-room shelves!

My phone rang as I was caressing book-spines, and I scrambled to retrieve it from the zipped pocket of my book-bag. It was Misty, calling from the hospital, scared and unwell and asking me to pray with her. It’s a request I am always honored to fulfill—I’ve prayed with her even from the baking aisle of the grocery store. Once again finding myself in a public place when the call came in, I closed my eyes to shut out my surroundings, and began to pray.

And after we said “Amen,” I reminded her that God’s got her—what she needs to do is to trust in that fact. If you, Reader, are a person who prays, I’d ask you to add Misty to your prayer today. They’ve found traces of heart muscle in her bloodstream, which indicates heart tissue is dying, and they’ve taken her by ambulance to a bigger town’s hospital. She’s frightened, and struggling to find peace.

I opened my eyes and the book sale popped back into being. I wandered for a while, with three books in hand (that’s some restraint, from me, where books are concerned) and just let my inner bibliophile enjoy the touch and smell and presence of books. There’s a small struggle, within, on this subject of e-books-versus-real-books.

The e-books are SO much more practical. When I pick up my iPad, I literally hold two thousand books in my hand. (I check out the “special offers and free books” section of the Apple bookstore every evening, and wait for the books I like, or want to read, to show up there for a buck or two. I’ve been curating this library since long before we bought the boat.) In e-book form I own almost every book I love, almost every book I might want to re-read or reference, and hundreds I’m looking forward to reading.

When I travel, I no longer have to search and guess at what I’ll feel like reading on vacation (or take up the space and weight in my luggage with the books I chose)—I slip my iPad into my little carry-on bag, and I have the library at my disposal. I can make the font in every book big enough for my aging eyes to read, even in bed without my glasses on. I can do that reading-in-bed without disturbing my husband with the bedside lamp. I can highlight and add notes to e-books, even if it doesn’t feel the same as annotating in a real book.

From a practical standpoint, the only issue is charge—and in this day and age, that’s hardly ever a problem. Heck, these days even airplane seats and cars have USB outlets. And I can slip my slim battery-pack into that carry-on. For the boat I even bought a small LED lantern that you can hand-crank to charge, with USB ports to charge other things. (“Other things” meaning my books, obviously!) The e-book just makes more sense. Still, I can’t deny how much I love the paper book. Ah, the heart wants what it wants.