Bookin'

I must be getting old. I wrote a few days back about friends visiting. I scoured my brain for interesting things to do while they were here. A visit to the locks where the water is raised and lowered to let boats of all sizes and even ships leave Lake Union and enter Puget Sound, visits to several major art museums in Seattle, a visit to the Museum of Flight to look at the Concorde or the Blackbird spy plane plus myriad other planes from WWI and WWII. What did they want to do? Go bookin’. I haven’t seriously hit the used bookstores in Seattle since retired in1982. That is not to say that I haven’t acquired any books since then. One look at my house would tell you that. But I used to take one Saturday a month and visit five or six book stores. I always came home with a load of books. If I still did that my house would collapse undner the load.

So we went bookin’. Now Gobe had a list and was quite conservative in his selections. Mike was another person altogether. It seemed like he came out of every store with four or five books. Me? I guess I was in between. A lot of mine were paperbacks of mysteries by Margery Allingham. I must have picked up ten or eleven of those. We must have hit eight or nine stores in three days. And Lord knows how many stores the guys hit in Portland on the way up and between there and Seattle. It was great fun but they surely did wear me out. And when they here they vowed to hit at least two more stores that had been closed on Monday when they drove up from Oregon.