Happy Meridian

Tuesday's car errands had me between Granville and Burrard, heading west along a chronically unremarkable section of town that, because of Broadway Line construction, has passed from anonymity into witness protection. Only at Arbutus did things come into focus, namely Fletcher's Cleaners, and a couple of blocks west of it, Tanglewood Books, where I stopped to look through its very small but always rewarding DVD collection.

Tanglewood has two narrow 7'-high shelves at the ends of two fifty foot-long units that allow the store its three aisles. The shelves face the cashier's desk by the door and are marked RECENT, I believe, a sign I thought referred to RECENTly acquired used books but are in fact new books. I've always found the books on these shelves to be uncannily in tune with the times (as the times appear to me), and I said as much to the clerk who told me it is the owner who does the selecting, and he'll be happy to hear it.

I purchased two new books from these shelves, and as is my habit, begin reading both at once. Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian (1985) I had first purchased at the Granville Book Company the year it came out, at the recommendation of one of its co-operators, Christopher Mooney, but never got past the judge's heckling of the evangelist, while Happy Hour (2020) by Marlowe Granados was published by my friend Martha Sharpe, the first book in her and Emily Keeler's Flying Books Publishing joint, though the copy in my hands is the Verso edition from the following year.

Separated by more than a third-of-a-century, these books are even further apart in form and content, a reading experience that allowed for a dream that had, for a fleeting moment, Cormac McCarthy dragged around a mid-2000s Brooklyn by Happy's Hour's we-know-better besties Gala and Isa, and Marlowe Granados dragged around an 1840s American southwest by Blood Meridian's The Kid. Although I didn't dream to the end of these scenarios, I didn't need to. We know it's never ending. It's just enough to think it so.