It is the ambience that begins the softening I think, the wood, the soft chairs and nooks where one can hide and yet be a part of a flow of conversation and movement of customers browsing for books, and the light, a shadowy light, not noir, but more like a comfortable row house in the city. The letting go is helped by someone who smiles at them, knows them by name, and serves them hot drinks. All of us who work here collect names and faces and know how to listen.
No one talks politics, not by pure avoidance, but because subjects of a more core importance arise first — books they love, journeys from which they have returned, and then even more intimate, their surgeries and illnesses, a husband’s dementia, a mother’s death, a monstrous father, children gone distant or wrong, romances begun, romances escaped, and their longings — those more than anything make up their irreducible humanity.
No matter the story, they all need someone to listen and not to judge with our eyes or tone this story, this conflict, this history. Loneliness is the great leveler. No matter their money, age or status, race or religion, they all yearn to connect, to talk, to feel engaged by another to whom they can tell a story, with whom they can laugh and share photos and unveil themselves.
The damn world is being smashed into rubble every day, but in here, the frenetic pace of that crack-up disappears and people visibly relax, the tension leaving them as you watch their faces as they talk, as they tell their stories so that something might be preserved of what they have seen and done.
