October 21, 2024
Greetings from the brick and mortar,
It was a crowded shop, filled with intriguing things, some cluttered into corners, some in orderly lines on shelves. Even after being there dozens of times, these things fascinated me, the shiny obscure things that seemed so necessary. But what really struck me, the first time and the last time I walked into the shop, was the bicycles lined up along one wall, their front tires canted to one side at parade rest.
There was a smell of rubber and oil and new things waiting to be held and used and fixed and sent back into the world. There was the sound of wrenches, of clicking derailleurs, and Gary’s voice, a distinctive, deep, raspy growl, punctuated with short laughs. When he wasn’t lighting a cigarette or smoking one, there was one teetering on the edge of something nearby, another part of the ambience.
There might have been three or four bicycle shops around when I was growing up, not counting Kmart. I had been in all of them, felt a similar vibration, but Gary’s shop was different because he was there. He took me under his wing, showed me what bike to buy, helped me learn how to fix it. Eventually he hired me to do easy repairs, unload trucks, clean up. When the time came for me to pack up for the road, touring thousands of miles all over the country, he gave me what I needed, and hugged me, and pushed me out into the world.
You can’t get that from Amazon.
This week I stopped into the used bookstore in my town, typical of the genre, the orphans lining shelves waiting to be adopted. The walls seasoned with hand made things, tables festooned with artfully arranged books and crafty gift ideas. The woman who owns it knows me by name, has my book in the window. She is always happy to see me. If I want something she can find it or get it. When I have books I can’t read even one more time, I bring them to her and she finds them a home. It’s as if she knows I would never throw a book away.
There are other places like this, which seem to be to be irreplaceable, but history shows that isn’t true about any place. Maybe that’s how it’s always been, but now it’s truer.
My sister Jenny worked in a record store when she was a teenager. There were posters on the wall showing the latest artists, records filled the bins in neat decks, organized by genre. There was always music playing and you could ask to ‘sample’ an LP before you bought it. If you didn’t know what album a song was on, you could sing a little of it, or guess the title, and someone would tell you what record to get. Maybe tell you to just invest in the 45 if the album was iffy. You looked at the art on the album cover, if it was open, read the liner notes, slid the black disc out of the paper sleeve and looked for scratches before you bought it. The process that made that experience obsolete is sanitary and ferociously effective, probably better for the consumer, and maybe the artist. This is progress, and with that there are some casualties.
The places where we once purchased things ached to be efficient and competitive, and we ached to get what we wanted faster, cheaper, and more convenient, all reasonable desires. In the whirl to achieve all that we left a few things behind. In the place of the relationships, we placed value on transactions, on exchanges, whether we could send our thing back for free if it wasn’t the right color of black, or seemed bigger in the picture on our phone. In place of the connection that we took for granted we have been given an anonymous, lonely box on our porch, left as if whoever delivered it was a little embarrassed.
Some years ago I heard a story on the radio about a scientist tracking a certain type of lizard that was an endangered specie. She described that it took years to learn that the animal was finally extinct, a sort of anticlimactic moment, just a date on screen, blinking until she clicked it off. No parade, no stories, just the end. A few people will remember, and then they won’t.
This is not a sentimental sigh about the good old days. I know about competition and growth and ROI and how behind every change there is something lost and something gained. But before one more tailor or lumber yard disappears, I want to pause to miss these spaces. The places where we put our hands on things, saw them, felt the room, talked with the people there.
The shoe repair place, slotted between glitzier shops, laceless boots with tongues hanging out, the pungent aroma of leather and polish and sweat, the new and old. The grocery store where the cashier looked at you and said your name, gave your little girl a sucker for being so good, and then a kid from the neighborhood took your bag to the car. The hardware store that weighed out a pound of nails. The bakery where the man came downstairs to his oven from the little apartment above, and turned on the light at three in the morning to make the bread so you could smell everything fresh when you came in.
No matter what sign was over the door, behind it was someone who said, this is how we’ll get our start, make our life, make a mark, live our dream. And every time you touched what they had, you felt it, became part of it.
Maybe one day the pendulum will swing back and people will want to sit in a rocking chair and hear about the wood it’s made from. They will want someone to help them choose a pair of pants for that special occasion. Maybe there will again be a person who fixes broken things, because we stopped saying “It’s cheaper to buy another new one.”
Until then it may be left to the places you can see and feel today. Barber shops, thrift stores, funeral homes, libraries. I have hope that there will always be some space like these, but just in case, take your child to the little coffee shop, the shoe store, the book store. Show her what it’s like, and maybe it will plant a seed.
Take her to a bicycle shop. I have a feeling that Gary will be smiling.
Hope this finds you keeping the memory alive,
David
Copyright © 2024 David Smith
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