lives unlived

[mer]

Having been mildly thwarted in my plan to order up a furnace today--who closes their office at 10 to 4?!--I thought I'd share this brief interlude I had while driving home from the lake this weekend.

My preferred route to the cottage--and I think we each have our own, everyone in the family--involves driving through a nowhere town called Hickory Corners, down West Hickory Road from the Gilmore Car Museum. Lest you think proximity to the car museum makes Hickory Corners a thriving metropolis--let me disabuse of that notion very quickly. There is a gas station. I can't even remember if it's out of business or not. (I think it's in business. It might have been out briefly.) There is a four-way stop. And there are some abandoned storefronts.

I had the brief, mad notion of what it would be like to buy one of the abandoned storefronts and open a bookstore and private lending library. Combo, of course. Wherein the residents of Hickory Corners could borrow books at will, and non-residents could pay a fee to join, and anyone who happened buy could also just buy any of the books. Like, if Powell's had a rental service as well.

It's an endeavor designed not to make money, of course; it's a public service, a way to house a lot of books in a place without a lot of books. You'd be a curiosity, a place people might stop on the way to the car museum--or not. But, it's just--I had a vision, a life I'll never live, delivered to me in a flash while I drove past the abandoned storefront. It'd be so very quiet in my store/library. I could get a lot of writing done.

Rationality usually takes hold whenever I think of moving someplace rural in Michigan, however; I am not meant for rurality. I'd go stir-crazy in four days. And arguing politics would be a nightmare. And let's not even get into what the diversity situation is like in no-town Michigan.

Comments

[http://users.livejournal.com/_earthshine_/]

... mad notion of what it would be like to buy one of the abandoned storefronts and open a bookstore and private lending library.

Would you consider doing it in a historic house in downtown Manchester?

I'm serious.

Plus you could throw in B&B on game weekends and make some dough.


I'm still serious.

[cathshaffer.livejournal.com]

I like Hickory Corners. I will be your partner in the book store and library. We'll put a cafe in it as well. With wifi, so that the throngs of people can come in and use the internet. There is an antique store there I've always wanted to go into. We are always on the way to or from somewhere else when we go by it, though. You can almost walk to Hickory Corners from my in-laws' house.

[dailypie.blogspot.com (from livejournal.com)]

Wouldn't it be interesting to clone yourself when one of those notions hits, so you could live that branch of reality and find out? I know: frou-frou. The idea reminds me of Northern Exposure's Cicely, though, and that brings on the nostalgia.

Your diversity comment made me laugh. We did a stage tour in '02 that had a long leg across the northern US. It wasn't till we pulled up to a venue in southern California and opened the truck to see our local crew of high schoolers that I realized how monochrome our human contact had been for several weeks. :) That said, Calumet, MI, was one of my favorite venues -- great pasties, great local crew, and a little tavern on the main strip that had a gorgeous Tiffany bar-back. You would never have guessed from the outside.

painter 11

[(Anonymous)]

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