The Old Man in the Romance Shop

He gives me a tour of the store, even though I had already toured it and found everything lined up alphabetically by author and according to genre - or more like sub-genre, since they all seemed to be romances, shelves and shelves of Jude Deveraux. He hands me a book during the tour, by Carly somebody ("This is hilarious, read the back of it"), then he sits back down and starts giving me advice and showing me pictures of his grandchildren.

"I have to live to see her graduate," he tells me. He hands me a three by five portrait of a four-year-old Lolita who can sing like an adult. Her long honeyed hair drips over her baby shoulders. "I'm eighty-one. That's ten more years."

He is healthy enough, he thinks he will make it. He asks if I am married or single. "When you find someone, make sure it is someone you can live with. Don't try to change anyone, because you can't. " I can't argue, or don't. "My wife says I talk too much," he says. "She is always yelling at me. But I just think I have so much to say that can help people your age." I smile. I won't try to change anyone.

I had come in for literature but had found only what I had already read (All Quiet on the Western Front) or what I did not want to read (The Complete Ghost Stories of Dickens). I browse bestselling novels by Andrew M. Greeley and Stephen King. The store doesn't take credit cards anyway.

He tells me about some men who bought three houses near the high school and filled them with marijuana and made millions but then were arrested. "The world has gone crazy," he says, and he can't believe it. There is a Depression coming; he can tell, he was born during the last one. The rich getting richer and the poor all buying marijuana. He can hardly believe it himself, but he is reading a book about the end of the world. There seems to be a trend in books on that subject. "Yes," he says, "but that's been true ever since I can remember."