Literary Bookpost, in Salisbury, NC, (home to an infamous Civil War prison - nobody told me that part of the story, 11,500 Union Soldiers buried in mass graves, but both sides atrocitified, plundered and more) is a transcendent space. Okay, so the bookstore peoples were just setting up their new store on the opposite side of Main Street from their old store. So the Salisbury newspaper wrote an article about Dean and Sheila and their bookstore partners saying "Literary Bookpost is closing." So school started that week & parents stayed home and I'm sure there are a thousand other good reasons only very few people came out last Friday night at 5:30 PM to sit with me, BUT the town of Salisbury nonetheless has a strong sense of presence, of integrity, & it is felt and seen there stacked on the shelves of the this wonderful and wondrous bookstore. It's worth a trip to see Main Street and browse the Literary Bookpost shelves.

I met a couple who have just opened a store in the building on the corner across from the bookstore. They live upstairs.

And the man, whose name I don't remember, told me a story about coaching soccer years ago. About having last pick among coaches and being told a kid who wasn't there was really, really good. So he picked the kid. With a Latino name. A Mexican kid, it turns out, carried over the border when a young boy. And that man also picked his brother, younger by a year, and another boy related or friends with them. And this team, which hadn't won a game for the past few seasons (under his coaching) went undefeated that year. And those boys started studying in that couple's house, the people who recently opened the store and live upstairs in the corner building across the street from Literary Bookpost.

The boys' mother, also illegal, didn't speak much English. The couple I met went to parent teacher conferences, studied with the boys, mentored them. Similar to the story I tell in What Else But Home, similar to the woman I met in North Conway, NH, at White Birch Books, helping raise boys from Boston.