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I'm staying with friends in my old apartment building. I lived there for my final year as a student and my first year after university. The people I'm staying with are my former neighbours and one of them is one of my former professors. Their place is so familiar to me that it's like being at home... only without internet access. But I had a game plan. I figured that if I walked over to campus, a mere 5 minutes away, I'd be able to to hop on to the campus internet with my student password. I knew exactly where I wanted to go. Ah, the best laid plans.
My final year of a university was both really, really good and really, really bad. I had a lot of personal stuff going on plus I was a heavy year for me in terms of courses and work. I was working three part time jobs for half the year and two for the rest of the year. I was a little bit busy and stressed to say the least. But one thing that was part of the good was working at the university bookstore .
I had not had a good summer so I was thrilled to get hired on to the bookstore at least for the first three weeks of classes. I didn't know if I'd have a chance to work past that but I did. And while the work wasn't always great I met some fabulous people there. I met a guy there that ended up being a sort of life preserver for me. We never dated, we were never involved, but he knew that things were not well for me on a personal level at the beginning of the year and got me to go out and blow off some steam. Granted this probably involved too much alcohol (and too many cigarettes) but I really needed to get out of my apartment and I really needed to do something fun. Fun was almost always involved when we went out and I spent many a weekend crashed on his couch. When some things hit a breaking point it was him that I called. I'm not sure how I would have made it through that year without him. I also met someone who would become one of my best friends. She actually wasn't a student but was a real store employee. We met at the Christmas party and a couple of months later I think our friendship was cemented when a couple of us made her cake for her birthday (she loves cake). A few years later she would be the person who got me into blogging.
My beautiful plan for today was to go to the bookstore, sit in the cafe, drink coffee and write and post. It didn't quite work out that way. First of all, when I got there I found two of the regular employees outside on a cigarette break. After chatting for awhile I found out that the cafe had just closed for the summer. This is new. It never used to close during the summer. No coffee?!?! So I chucked the idea of doing anything there that didn't involve socializing.
When I reflect back on the my time at the bookstore I realize that I was very lucky. As a child I had always said that I wanted to work at a bookstore. My family thought this was amusing because they were pretty sure if I did I'd end up spending my entire paycheck there. It didn't happen because I was too poor that year and too busy to do any real reading. But I left with something a lot better than books. I left with great memories and real friends. Books have really been good to me, in so many ways.
Contributing Editor Sassymonky also blogs at Sassymonkey and Sassymonkey Reads.
