Rick Simonson

Leap the Day

This Friday past was February 29 - a once in four years day. For whatever reason, I felt it worthy of seeing it as this unusual day, not so much an extra one, but one whose relative infrequency helps call to attention how we look at time - the days, the months, the years.

Like any day, it would carry within it both surprise and the expected, and the ways those qualities are carried in the other. In surprise, the out of the blue - there can somehow be what's expected, even anticipated. And in the expected and anticipated - what's been laid or set out as some course, for the day or some duration - there can be this great surprise. Some of us are slower at seeing and getting this than others (speaking for myself). To see and take this all in - it has taken years on many fronts. And then to do so without cynicism or pre-digested world-weariness weighing in ...

So it seemed with this past Friday. Even before I got to work, the back and forth had weighed in - matters of no great import were clamoring for immediate attention, big attention at that. Meanwhile matters of significance, far greater, were posed in such a way that nothing could or should be done. But ... So it goes. 'We'll see' is one of the codes of the road, a marker for things in their time, this time or some other, whatever it might be.

Once arrived, February 29 at Elliott Bay meant getting to work with Adam Schnitzer, our estimable and energetic rep for Perseus. He has the whole west coast - the 'larger accounts' - as his territory. Perhaps this Leap Day did figure in as a use of an 'extra' day for Adam. Whereas this was now just almost his last sales call of the spring season - and my last scheduled appointment for a house rep - it originally was supposed to be just about the first for each of us. I would gauge that as far back - possibly last summer's fall season sales call, or, more likely at the PNBA's fall trade show (held, literally, as we were stepping from summer into autumn) - Adam would have had us all marked down for a date right out of the chute - the first week of January. Looked good to me at the time. Come December an invitation to go far away for book doings would come - bolt of surprise - right in that patch of scheduled time in early January. Of those who had to be rescheduled, Adam was the only that would have to come again some distance, and he was most gracious about it.

He was also gracious about it when I ventured to ask, as the appointment had gone along - Basic, DaCapo, Public Affairs - before a break for lunch - and it turned out he had made the flight up from San Francisco just to do this appointment. Fortified by lunch, we resumed - Running and then the procession through the uneven world of Perseus' distribution lines - then it would be off to the airport and home for Adam. Not before, however, we got our next date down. Mid-May and the next go-around. The early side of things we will again attempt.

Friday night at Elliott Bay was marked by a different, almost cyclical kind of return - or perhaps, given his book's subject matter, it was some kind of avian migratory pattern. Author Bruce Barcott came to read, talk about, and sign his new book, The Last Flight of the Sacred Macaw (Random House). Bruce is a Seattle writer, through and through - raised here and near, schooled at the University of Washington, schooled further through a decade of writing largely about books and writers at the Seattle Weekly. He has now moved on - somewhat. A regular writer for Outdoors, he has been on a journalism fellowship at the University of Colorado in Boulder for the past two years. It's a post I think is temporary, that Seattle is still home and soon to be returned to.

For Bruce, whether it was the passage of time, his being away, the book's subject matter, whatever - some confluence is bestowing more attention his way than ever before. There'd even been a rave, front-page review in The New York Times Book Review. When I say 'passage of time,' I mean it in Bruce's case. It'd been a decade since his last book. That's two Leap Days, and halfway to a third.

Odd as the day's weather had been - it had started off with the balmiest, spring-sweet morning sun, then given way to wind, clouds, and chilly rain - it all could have portended a quiet evening (picture the wet, glistening streets, the darkness that felt like it came back earlier) at the store. Somehow one knew that it wouldn't be so.

I would later hear it wasn't - colleague Karen Maeda Allman and others were there guiding the way for a packed house, overflow, homecoming-feel evening - with lots of books sold. A special night, all way 'round.

My own evening was the leap it always feels to cross Lake Washington. (A slight leap it may be, but I'm not sure the bridge to Bellevue and George and Sharilyn Carroll's house had been crossed by me since leaving the PNBA trade show back in September.) There at George and Sharilyn Carroll's house, would be a special 'toast' to the Michaels - Michael Coy and Michael Brasky.

Michael and Michael had just concluded the two-months it had been since reluctantly announcing the decision to close their M Coy Books after eighteen years in downtown Seattle. Words have been written elsewhere, nationally and locally, about this. The news went far. It was, a bit weirdly, probably the day I would have been seeing Adam Schnitzer in Seattle that first week of January, that the announcement went out in the form of a 'Dear Friends' letter from Michael Coy. The letter found me halfway around the world. In English and in my limited attempts at Chinese, I found myself telling how a beloved 'shudian,' or bookstore, run by longtime friends and colleagues, was closing its doors.

I don't know what the winding down of the store itself was like - for people coming by, some of whom would have known the news, others who wouldn't, until they'd come upon a place with signs, dwindling inventory, and then no inventory. Between January travels, the pace of the buying season, the other twists and turns of the busy winter months, and maybe a bit of the ongoing winter darkness, I felt very little sense of 'horizon,' but knew, however limited it was, that this gathering on the 29th was on it.

With those involved in planning such an occasion - George, Pennie Clark Ianniciello (of Costco), and the Michaels themselves - one should know that whatever one thought such a gathering would be, this would carry surprise in it, even if to be carried off in lowkey, stand and mingle manner. It was not, first of all, a funeral or memorial. As one who has been to a lot of those of late (actual ones, real ones), that 'air' would have been picked up on quickly. Yes, there was a certifiable melancholy to the reason for this night - M Coy's closing - but it was a bit of the nature of the Michaels' ways through life in books, and those who were there, that this felt like something a little larger.

This wasn't a gathering of M Coy's customers and neighbors - though some there certainly were. It wasn't a gathering of the present ranks of sales reps, either - there were maybe four reps presently making the local rounds who were there, and at that, I'm not sure the Michaels saw them for orders. There had been less and less of that in recent years, more working through wholesalers. Instead, the night first had the air of about 1985 about it, a time harkening to Michael Brasky's being the head buyer at Pacific Pipeline - and therefore, not only the most significant player in the bookbuying universe regionally, but also one of the most imporant nationally. He knew how to play the part, too. That people for this evening came from Portland and from well north of Seattle, from San Francisco and Chicago and New York - all are testimony to what both Michaels have meant over time.

In conversations leading up to the night - and in the air at this gathering - were the many work lineages and ancestries - who worked where when, whose work or enterprise begat or led to another. Both Michaels had been part of that - J.K. Gill, Pacific Pipeline, B. Bailey, Bailey/Coy, Moving Books - California, Portland, Seattle - all could get cited, and then some. And with others. There were at least six Viking Penguin alums there, people who had succeeded each other as reps and regional managers. How many from the University Bookstore - Lee Soper, Marilyn Dahl, David Brewster, Joe Cain (I think ...). The considerable whole of Arbur Books, circa 1976 - Sally Argo, Cindy Burdell, Kathie Werner - was there. Reps who we know live here and still work but whom we seldom see - Michael Carley and Harry Kirchner - because they solely call on Amazon were there. Michael was one of those Viking alums - then put in some Elliott Bay time before going to Simon, where he still is, lo some 28 years later, albeit over in another country. Harry's past - not only his longtime stint as the PGW rep, but even his days as the buyer at Seattle University (with a little literary distribution enterprise on the side), were recalled. Of all those there, perhaps two still work where they did thirty years ago. Some of the reps are still reps, but none is where they were or doing the same publishers as then. This group, by and large, was both rooted and nimble.

Most of those assembled had these varied pasts - and many aspects of those pasts were even more present in the form of former spouses attending (we won't even take stabs or guesses at what other alliances there may have been, but there was something in the air of the once upon a time, a night or two here, a stretch of time there ...).

That also may have been part of why, sadness of M Coy's closing considered, there wasn't a feeling of this being a final chapter. Both Michaels have been through the transitions over the years, not always by their own choosing. Similarly, many if not most there had been through some chastening, humbling experiences along the way. (Humbling? We all work in this little universe ... that, alone, keeps humility very present ...)

With a life of eighteen years, M Coy Books was not even half of the Michaels' working book lives. What they did with the store, always with style, was certainly instructive. No bookstore was as known as they were for the combination of service and personality they gave it. That both Michaels did so after years when they were among the hierarchical high and mighty, the ones waited upon, invited and wooed for everything - is testament to both the kind of people they are and as an underlying lesson in knowing how any of this ultimately works - the putting of books in people's hands.

Speaking of instructive, Michael Brasky, especially, was and is known, for some choice axioms that have continued to work, years along, like the best of oral tradition's teachings. In the rounds of toasts and gentle roasts made at this gathering, one on hand said that thanks to Michael B., he got his hair cut on company time because, in Michael's words, it grew on company time. A couple times a year, I either say, or hear said, Michael's guiding rule for accepting invites to social invitiations (especially BEAs): never go to anything that requires getting or being on a boat. Think about it (if you must).

The night was what it was for those gathered. Some of us see a fair number of those gathered with some regularity - even if not in Seattle. But not like this. Probably no one there saw everyone all the time, not even the Michaels. The closing of M Coy means a central place for much of that visiting is no longer there, either. And for them ...?

The night wound down. Several had already left when someone still there looked at her watch and said, oh goodness, it's nearly 11. Funny how 11 seemed late to this group now.

The drive back over the lake seemed quicker than the drive earlier. Was it possible that the last time I was on this bridge, going this way, in September? Then, driving back the few miles it actually is from Bellevue to Seattle, I'd been cognizant that I was about to get on a plane and fly 3,000 miles. This time, no such traveling was in sight. Instead, now, the pondering of how much time, distance, and company there had been in this once-in-four-years day: its messages, its miles, its hours, its years, its acknowledgement of the past, its wonderings for the future. It was dark and chilly again. City lights were gleaming on the water, the stars above visible. All at once, you could see it. It was a close night, it was a vast night.

Posted by Rick Simonson on March 4, 2008 | Comments (0)