Listen to Jim: http://jimreedbooks.com/mp3/strollingtheaislesofcountedsighs.mp3
or read on…
The wizened old rare-book dealer emits an un-self-couscious sigh as he walks his hoarded aisles and straightens up what avid customers have re-arranged in their quest for just the right titles to adopt. He doesn’t know his sighs have been noticed by treasure hunters two rows over. Indeed, he is not even aware that he has sighed.
One collector is on hands and knees in front of the poetry section of the store, riffling through assorted titles in search of a book that, to the dealer, is in plain view. The dealer doesn’t speak up out of respect for the customer’s self-esteem. He figures that, should this woman get frustrated enough, she’ll wind up asking for the book, which he will gently fetch from the shelf and offer to her, thus curing her sigh attack.
A man rushes into the shop, proferring a one-dollar bill and asking for parking meter change. He sighs loudly, waiting for a palmful of quarters, which the shopkeeper gladly hands him in hope that he’ll return and browse. As the street man rushes out, the dealer suppresses a sigh, knowing from three decades of experience that he’ll probably never see this man again, and that the man will never realize he’s not even said, “Thank you!”
A young woman sequesters herself in the corner by mail boxes filled with letters and diaries and postcards, reading century-old love letters written by people whose lives are long past living but whose words still ring true and honest. She sighs sweetly, wishing that she could go back in time for just a minute, simply to tell the authors that she, at least, appreciates their desires and longings and wishes both fulfilled and unfulfilled.
Later, a four-year-old tagalong customer sighs loudly as she gazes at the basket of MoonPies and DumDums, her taste buds focusing all attention on the trove. Hearing her sigh, the bookdealer gives her one of each goody, making sure she takes the time to select the exactly correct flavor of the lollipop, the exact correct favorite that she just knows is better than all the flavors of the world.
One beyond-middle-age browser hastens to the front of the store, holding aloft the grail he’s been looking for since youth, a copy of A CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES, “the funniest book ever written,” he exclaims, with a sigh of satisfaction.
Later in the day, when all living beings but the book dealer have departed, he listens to what should be the Quiet, but all he can hear are the sighs and whispers of thousands of bookie souls enjoying their peace, cherishing their own printed words and images, and awaiting the next flux of browsers who themselves will be unobtrusively browsed and examined by the books, the books who become observers of the 21st-century world they notice, bemused
(c) 2013 A.D. by Jim Reed