Guess what’s new at Bookman today? The entire back room has two inches of red mud on the floor and seeping up the boxes! The rear quarter of the main room is soaked and red with red rock. All the paperback on the floor, from the P’s of Fiction, through Psychology, through Anthropology and Theatre, to somewhere in History are soaked like sponges. All the magazines standing in folders likewise syphoned the water straight up.

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The other night I was driving back from closing the store, a warm fall evening by now completely dark. My attention was drawn to a bus stop illuminated by a backlit panel. I instantly recalled having passed a bus about a block before because there in silouette was a little girl dancing exuberantly probably at the sight of the approaching bus. Her mother was seated, holding her hand, and this smallish lanky girl was jumping all around against the teather of her mother’s arm. I imagined my sister and her daughter and their daily city life, inter-dependent everyday chores made completely of small ordinary moments which from afar of course appear extraordinary.

Products IRRESISTIBLY priced! They’re made overseas you see, where we don’t have to obey labor, safety and environmental standards. It’s cheaper that way.
 
In the U. S. we have to clean up what we pollute, we have to pay workers a minimum wage, we can’t hire little kids, and we can’t kill them with noxious gases and get away with it. In the U. S., workers live to retire and collect benefits. That’s just too expensive.

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Labor day. It commemorates the likes of Samuel Gompers, Big Bob Haywood and Mother Jones and their efforts to unite working class peoples. They met great resistance from gullible populations of consumers and business owners who weren’t going to give anything unless they were forced.

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