Memoirous

I wrote a couple days ago about the Book Box/Shake, Rattle, and Read and how they got me through the hard times here in Uptown. Today I’m going to write about “the one that got away.” We all have stories like these. For example once my husband and I were traveling and stopped in Wooster, Ohio at a used bookstore where he came upon a signed book by G. K. Chesteron. But who had $100 when we were intentionally avoiding the toll road because of the tolls! Still, he brings it up sometimes like an old war wound that has never healed. It galls him, the one that got away. My story is similar. After moving to Chicago in 1982 I was living and volunteering among the poor. Definitely funds were scarce, but I always enjoyed browsing the bookstore. It was in fact my lifeline. One afternoon I was in there and stumbled upon a title about the Arctic. I’ve always loved stories about the North and South Pole. Usually they involve eating dogs on some barren wind-swept ice plateau or figh...

    I’ve lived in Uptown in Chicago for 34 years—and that whole time there has been a little used bookstore down the street at Lawrence and Broadway. First it was the Book Box and then it changed its name to Shake, Rattle, and Read. Along with books there was a wide assortment of used vinyl. The current owner Ric Addy will never know what a godsend his shop has been to me through the years. Readers of this blog will have already picked up that books have saved my life. Reading has been my constant companion even before I could read. As a pre-reader I begged for the same books to be read to me over and over. I connected with story. As miserable as the Uptown neighborhood appeared to me in the early 80s it was only bearable because of the Book Box. I’d go there with empty pockets, just to browse. That’s all I could afford. Still it was enough to stand there in that environment and breathe in words, musty yellowed pages of them, pulp fiction covers, ...