Adaptation may be the perfect prompt for a writer who generally starts out with one thing in mind, and ends up with something else entirely. And then I realize, it’s pretty much the way my life goes too. So I had to do it, write about adaptation.
I had every intention this week to blog about the opening of Queen Anne Book Company in Seattle.
Let me say, 2012 was a trying year for residents on Queen Anne Hill. First we lost our dear little Metropolitan Market–not only all the fresh produce and food but they took our only “nursery” with it. And then Queen Anne Books closed, which was like losing our right arm, or right brain. We didn’t even have a chance to protest the closing of the latter. They just announced what date would be their last, closed the door and locked it, leaving a community, a people who consider literature as important as breathing, helpless and lost.
For a while I wondered, will I have to move? Capital Hill, the next hill over, where The Elliott Bay Book Company is going strong, was my first thought. Who knows, I might have had my house on the market by now but for the fact that the good people of Queen Anne Book Company were coming to our rescue.
I figured I’d be visiting my folks on the east coast while the proprietors were doing their final touches on the space, then flying back to walk through those bookstore doors again and say, “I’m home!”
Not so fast. Nothing happens like that.
Now instead of walking through those bookstore doors in Queen Anne—to my sanctuary, my talisman, my church, the place I hope one day may help launch me as a writer—I am still on the east coast, in a quiet coastal town outside Boston, helping my folks see their way through a bewildering upcoming downsizing move from a home to an apartment in a retirement village. Not exactly the way they had envisioned it all either.
So we all must adapt.
Can I tell you it is harder to write here? The explosion of phone calls never stops, plus the length and breadth of each conversation. The ringers are all turned up, the radio is turned up, television volume is turned up. All the time. This may be a retirement home, but I realize what a quiet, monastic life I live in Seattle. Where I am linked to the world primarily through books and writing. Maybe Mozart in the background….
In Seattle, my friends and I communicate primarily through email, quiet as it is. With just a couple hours notice we ask, “Would you like to walk today?” or “Would you be interested in attending the (reading, symphony, or a performance) tonight?”
And the cities themselves: in Boston I hear a lot of blue-collar anger in the honking of horns and the yelling. It’s noisy. In comparison, Seattle is like meditation when I return from practically anywhere. What I want to say is: it’s almost like a way of being in the world. A place to connect with like-minded others, as in a good independent bookstore.
If I ever get back there. Big storm blowing in here.
