Chapter 29 Book Shopping in San Francisco

I had a great day Thursday, driving up to San Francisco to the shop of a respected bookseller to purchase something that is just perfect for my Dante catalogue. Sorry. You’ll have to wait for the catalogue to see it. He had a lovely shop with floor to ceiling shelves, a beautiful desk, a library table — the kind of antiquarian bookseller haven I can only fantasize about right now.

After a satisfying late morning making my purchase and visiting two other booksellers, I walked to Union Square. The Blue Angels, in town for Fleet Week, soared overhead performing aerobatic maneuvers. I stopped for lunch by myself (this is a real treat for someone who’s eaten every meal with small children for the past nine years) at a cafe where I had a (ridiculously self-indulgent) chocolate and banana crepe and a cup of tea capped off by (this is really over the top) a dark chocolate truffle. It’s definitely autumn now, as there was none of the usual summer fog to be seen. It was a sunny, crisp day, beautiful in all respects. A gift from the book gods.

Friday, it’s back to the homefront. I am driving Huck and a group of first graders to Half Moon Bay for their class field trip to the pumpkin farm. Half Moon Bay, a semi-rural community on the coast, is beautiful this time of year — fields filled with pumpkins, a light fog from the Pacific Ocean, and a few trees that actually look autumnal (trees whose leaves turn colors are not often seen in my part of California — one of the few negatives about West Coast living). The Book Mobile will be operating as the Mom Mobile, toting five 6 and 7 year olds along for the ride and supervising them as they run rampant through a field of gourds. It’ll be a lot of fun, but I’ll wish I could take a nap when it’s over. These type of days are a gift, a different kind of gift than finding and selling books, but a wonderful gift all the same. (Sorry for the sappy sentiment, but the older my kids get, the more I realize that soon they won’t want to visit pumpkin farms with their parents.)

Happy Friday to you!