Every generation is a secret society with tastes and enthusiasms and interests which are a mystery to outsiders and to posterity itself. Someone said that. Do you care who? The point is that young people are a mystery and the older you get the more young people there are.
Conversely, old people are not much mystery to the young but are more like wallpaper or stop signs that can be seen through at a glance. In other words, “The child does not know that men are not only bad from good motives, but also good from bad motives. He simply knows a nice guy from a little prick and a sweet and friendly girl from a bitch.”
I was talking with a friend of mine this morning about children at Bookmans. I don’t personally recall in twenty-one years a bad kid—not under four feet tall anyway. When they come in they act like they’ve been taught to act in a library and point and whisper and pet any available dog or anything that’s being walked on a string. They have gift certificates that are burning holes in their pockets or they have a dollar thirty-six and their eyes are wide open and they break into a run so as to cover as much of the store as possible.
There’s crap everywhere that looks like it should cost about a dollar thirty-six unless this is a stickup of some kind. Little angels, statues of birds, corn cob pipes, purple rocks, framed pictures of Bart Simpson, plastic monsters, soft dolls with big eyes, strap on wings. And books. Lots of books.
Recently, a woman stood before me at the information desk and she was about six feet tall and looked like an Italian fashion model and I said, “May I help you?” and she just looked at me as though I were supposed to recognize her and all of a sudden I said, “Oh, my God.” and put my hand over my mouth. She was someone who used to be five years old and unable to look over the top of the desk and we had lots of laughs together when she was a child. She had lived in Europe for the past twenty years.
She came and put her arms around me and said she remembered me from back when everything was everything. The point of this is that children are our customers. They are not the children of our customers—they are our customers, too. They see what goes on here, they feel and remember what goes on here and remember who was what and who was who.
We’ve helped grow this little generation. A buck thirty-six here, a buck thirty-six there. That’s what built everything you see around you. Not Tolstoy or Yiddish proverbs or rare books. We look around us for big spenders but just like they say in Las Vegas, “Big spenders never done nothin’ for us.” It’s the dollar thirty-six cent slots.
Beneath all that, and overriding all that, is a genuine desire that our children are exposed to Tolstoy and Yiddish proverbs. They feel that. Without being able to articulate what they feel. They feel that there is culture at the heart of our business without knowing what the word “culture” means. What is more important is they know they are welcome here and they’re treated with respect. Later on in life they will remember us in that light and we will have had a customer for life. Born and bred right here on the farm.
Meanwhile, all they need to know is that if they give us two dollars they get sixty-four cents in change….William Hillis
