At last I left the heavier peace and hate-peace group chatyping to others and managed to slip out of the apartment for a combined meeting over lunch and book  shopping in Front Royal, Virginia.  (Highly recommended stops in Front Royal: both the Royal Oak Bookshop and, across the street from it — always a great pairing, the groovy old bookstore and authentic devoted bar and restaurant — J’s Gourmet, and such are the causes — decent books and great food — of my yet modest expression of “Dunlap’s Disease”).

Down at the bar Monday night: rough!

I can still whip out a pretty good Springsteen, oh yeah, but groupies 81 and Anyone’s Guess three sheets to the wind and bumping and grinding by my knee, now that’s a bit of a scene.  For a Monday night.

So the gent with the voice, still tack-sharp timing, and a Takamine six string takes his pay and slips into the Mustang and hurries back to his extraordinary library, which, in relation to the mid-week adventure, has been lengthened by 30-inches (in late stage bibliophilism, one no longer counts spines but notes with justifiable worry — “Watch out below!” — the expansion of the enterprise in linear feet).

The depth of the to-read pile shames me, but there’s one volume beside the spy novels, religious histories, and political analyses that I am looking forward to quite: a collector’s edition of Robert Louis Stevenson’s In the South Seas, leather bound with its own sewn-in gold silk bookmark.

Ya hah!