You Never Know Who You Might Meet At A Bookstore

Last Saturday I had a book event at a nearby Barnes & Noble, the one in Rockville, MD. Not too many people came. That was all right. It didn't surprise me for this event; nothing personal. But the B&N staff were friendly and fun, and the few people who did stop by got my undivided attention. It was fine. It was about to get even finer.A woman came to the display, a lovely older woman. She drives to this particular B&N, pretty far from where she lives, on a regular basis because she likes it; she finds the staff so nice and helpful. I had brought a bunch of my books and forthcoming books with me to the store, not just the book B&N was featuring that day. She looked at everything and we chatted about this and that. She said she wanted to buy The Year of Goodbyes, the story of my mother's childhood in Germany, because she thought a granddaughter would like it. She asked the bookseller if the store had it in stock, and they went off to the store computer to look it up. A few minutes later they came back. The book wasn't on the shelves, but the woman--Nancy is her name--had ordered it. Now she had in hand the print-out of the book description from the B&N website. She sat down and pointed to my mother's name, “Jutta Salzberg,” and said, “I went to junior high with her. I went to junior high with your mother.” It was easy to be certain, given Mom's unusual name.They attended Paul Junior High here in D.C. Only junior high, not high school. After Paul Junior High they never saw one  other again. Nancy remembered Mom having a slight accent, since my mother at that time had been in the U.S. only about a year. This would have been 1939 or 1940. She said that she, Nancy, was brand-new to D.C. at the time, having moved from Philadelphia, and the other kids weren’t nice to her. But, she said, my mother and my mother’s best friend—“Beverly,” she said, and I knew that name from my mother’s history—took her under their wing and were friendly and made her feel better. We both tried to remember Beverly’s last name, but couldn’t.Oh my goodness. We hugged like long-lost friends. Everyone in hearing distance was almost as tickled as we were. She is 88. She drives herself where she wants to go, uses a cane that looks just like my mother’s did (one of those drugstore canes with a cheerful colorful design printed on it), and is steady as can be. We didn’t want to say goodbye. When the book comes in and she returns to the B&N, she will email me so I can go there and meet her again to sign it.We finally did say goodbye. Three minutes later, she came back. “Shulman,” she said. “Beverly Shulman.” Yup, it was. Beverly is in my mother’s poesiealbum.See, you never know who you might meet at a bookstore.