Tag independent bookstore

Day 1 of the Massachusetts adventure: Mystic

Angel Ackerman Leave a comment

Yesterday, I drove my friend Gayle to Massachusetts.

We’re driving up route 287 through New Jersey, 50 miles into the journey, and the tire pressure light goes on. We drive a couple miles and no exits advertise gas stations, so eventually I get off at the next exit. We drive through some beautiful tree-lined streets, no businesses in site, and eventually I see a sign for police. I follow it.

If I need to wait for AAA, a police station nearby is a good thing. And maybe a police station means a town. No such luck.

Eventually, I pull over. I can’t find the tire gauge we used to keep in Eva’s car. She confirms it never made it into my car. Gayle uses her phone and finds the nearest QuickCheck while I walk around the car kicking the tires and listening for hissing sounds that would indicate a nail or something in the tire. With the tires having passed my inspection, we head to the closest QuickChek.

We use the facilities. They have no air machine. So we walk to the Auto Zone next door and buy a cheap tire gauge and a quart of oil. Might as well buy the quart of oil.

It looks like Gayle’s side of the car might be a little low. We drive across the street to the Sunoco. No air. We get back on the highway, and two exits later, we see a sign for Wawa. As we look for Wawa, we see a QuickChek with air. I fill all the tires. The light does not go out. I reset the light. It comes on.

Eventually, we give up and drive with the light on.

We arrived in Mystic, Connecticut at 12:20 instead of 11:15. But the shopping village near the aquarium where one can find Alice’s Little Haunted Bookshop was very cool. So cool that Gayle was cold and huddled in the corner… Actually, Gayle found some great children’s books but she really was cold and I didn’t notice how miserable she looked because I was preoccupied with the chandelier.

But the true winners at the shopping village were Becca Rose (so much tarot and books, so many spooky hair clips) and Cloak & Wand— a coffee shop that sold wands and cloaks and books.

From there, Gayle wanted to check out the walk box for the local Volkssport trail which was at a Howard Johnson’s nearby and we had lunch at Mystic Diner while plotting our next adventure. The hope was a short walk– not the full 5K– and then heading over to Stonington to see the new location of Square Bank Books and visit Lara Ehrlich’s writing studio, Thought Fox Writers Den.

But Mystis had too many interesting twists and turns, and a candy store, and a drawbridge, and we ended up starting the walk at the wrong entrance of the museum and adding more than half a mile…

So while we walked by the former location of the bookstore, we did not make it to the new one. The drive to Massachusetts was uneventful, except for some traffic in Worcester and discussion of my great grandmother’s birthplace in Lowell.

We arrived at Doubletree for our warm cookies around 6:30 and I had dinner and was in the hot tub by 8 p.m. The hotel restaurant where we ate was named Characters— another omen that we ended up in the right place. Speaking of omens we found pennies at just about every stop today.

The final leg of bookstores and driving

Angel Ackerman 6 Comments

If you’ve been following my journey, you know that yesterday morning I left Greenville, SC, for Atlanta. It was about a three hour drive, technically less, but I stopped at bookstores and other places to entertain myself along the way.

As a small business owner, I am doing everything I can to make this trip inexpensive and fun.

I have a massive crate of snacks (which M said was very me) that are my emergency food rations and I’ve been gathering more items along the way– the “breakfast” at my previous hotel was grab-and-go so I now have two muffins. I stopped at a rest stop in Anderson County, South Carolina (my mother’s maiden name, plus near Clemson where my stepmom attended school) and saw that vending machine benefited the South Carolina some-organization-for-the-blind. I bought two snacks, because I saw something one doesn’t normally see in vending machine: snacks with protein! Individual packs of tuna salad and chicken salad. My collection now has one of each. And at the conference, I snagged a bag of raisinets. Fruit, right?

Of my snacks, I have eaten two KIND breakfast bars and a bag of harvest cheddar snap peas. I had forgotten how delicious those are.

My breakfast stop yesterday was Panera. They offered me a $1 bagel again. I considered Waffle House for my “main meal” stop of the day, but the timing didn’t work out because I stopped at a TA “travel center” to pee and grabbed a banana while selecting a magnet for Eva.

I have been buying Eva magnets from different places because they are usually cheap, easy to transport and they are easy to store at home. Magnets don’t take up space. They sit on the fridge or on a filing cabinet. I texted her from the truck stop to ask, “Are you to old for a magnet?” and I got the response, “never.”

Three Bookstores of the Day

  • Walls Of Books: A chain of used bookstores, I visited the one in Commerce, Ga. Bought three old paperbacks. Really wanted a book on found on Hebrew and English and the Old Testament but it was almost $20 and I can’t read Hebrew.
  • The Book Nook: A strange used everything store in Lilburn, Ga. This was the only place I didn’t talk to anyone because the people and the customers were all really old. And it was the only place I walked into where nobody talked to me. They had everything from records to comics to books and DVDs. And a cat-themed ladies room.
  • Phoenix & Dragon: A spiritual bookstore on the outskirts of Atlanta. I had to go and find a witchy present for Eva. And the name! They had three cats who live in the store. Best collection of tarot cards I gave ever seen in one place.

Chasing a dream in the autumn chill

Angel Ackerman 1 Comment

Sometimes, as members of the human race, we have days that are full of delights from sun-up to sundown. Those days are rare, but often involve a leisurely day with the family, a vacation or a holiday.

Then there are days that are good despite— or perhaps because of — their imperfections and today was one of those days.

Maybe today was my “bones day” after all. If you don’t get the reference, it’s a prognosticating pug on TikTok (read more here).

I was originally going to blog this on the Parisian Phoenix website, but I thought I could be more honest and personal here. So here I am.

I came home from work in a lot of pain last night. I achieved 90% in my work metrics and came home, once again, in the kind of pain that leaves me crying and nauseous. Part of a marker for bad pain for me is if the pain interferes with my sleep and/or does not dissipate by morning.

I did not sleep well and I woke in pain.

But, I got up, got dressed, combed my hair and put on makeup. Because today was the Easton Book Festival. It might have been cold and rainy, but I was putting my best foot forward, even if the discomfort made it hard to put a shoe on that foot.

Now, here’s the thing.

Easton has been a part of my life for more than 25 years. Even now, I live very close to Easton. I can walk there.

Book and Puppet Company has been a part of our lives for quite some time. The teenager’s father connected with the owners of the independent bookstore. The teenager had a career as a contained character there.

Andy Laties of Book and Puppet founded the Easton Book Festival three years ago. I even appeared in the original “Read a Book” video— and they also featured a Muslim student in hijab outside the literacy center at my last non-profit job in development at ProJeCt of Easton.

My supervisor there quickly forgot the things I did well, like that placement and our involvement in the Easton Downtown Association scarecrow competition, in which they still participate. But I digress.

The teenager’s father now serves on the board of the Easton Book Festival, so when they organized a local author’s event, he invited me.

One month into Parisian Phoenix’s launch and I have a promotional spot. I didn’t sell enough books to pay for the small expenses of the event: parking, coffee, book printing (but hey, I would have needed those anyway), and the copy of the inaugural issue of the Lehigh Valley Literary Magazine I bought. And an overpriced breakfast.

But one person not only bought my book, but also came back specifically to hear me read. So that was touching.

I read a scene from the sequel to MANIPULATIONS, COURTING APPARITIONS where the villain performs a magical ritual in downtown Easton.

It was my first “reading out” in years!

I kept it very brief, because some others had run long and we were all tired.

Until the YouTube video drops— you should be able to view the Facebook live here.

I had intended to join the teenager’s father at one of the last poetry events of the festival, but I was frozen so I came home instead.

My neighbor, aka Sobaka’s mom, has now formally joined the Parisian Phoenix team as a proofread. She says we need to talk about chapters 1 & 2 of COURTING APPARITIONS tomorrow.

The teenager’s father received the copyright for his upcoming poetry chapbook so that could be going to press in a few weeks.

And tomorrow I hope to make applesauce, post some new material from Rachel Thompson on the Parisian Phoenix blog, and start typing Maryann Stephanie Ignatz’s material.

I even got to have dinner at my favorite diner with my neighbor to celebrate Jan’s official status as part of the Parisian Phoenix team.