so I spoke with this fiddler yesterday, Thursday Sept 24, on 9th Street in Durham, NC, just across the street from Duke University, just beside The Regulator Bookshop...

He was a bit forlorn, worn for the road. His music was beautiful. Gentle. Considered. Bluegrass and sonatas. He carried hardship. He was down. He showed me the hardcover book he was reading. Ted Kennedy. I put money in his violin case. We shook hands.

I was supposed to be reading at The Regular Bookshop. This is their frontdoor, yesterday...

My Rutland, VT, high school classmate Nansi Gregor-Holt and her husband, & Rabbi Goldberg, the retired rabbi from our New England hometown - met me for dinner before. Then we walked to The Regulator Bookshop.

I've recognized the foreshadowing. A bookstore that doesn't put your book in their window display, a bookstore that posts a flier with the book title and subtitle, the cover and author, a bookstore that doesn't go through the effort to include a blurb about the book (pretty easy to find on the publisher's or the author's website, on Powell's or some such), that doesn't include an author's photo, that bookstore just isn't, ummm..., just isn't doing what Carla Cohen of Politics & Prose does... See, Carla Cohen is a genius and saint to book lovers in good bookstores, to book writers. She spends effort to make sure ZERO people show up for a reading.

My reading at Politics & Prose was PACKED. With smart and considered peoples.

Here are some photos of the best not-so-little bookstore owned by the best co-owner I've come across yet....

If you want to get to Politics & Prose, take the Red Line to this subway (oops, Dorothy, we're not in NY anymore, "Metro") stop...

When / if you walk inside, go 1/4 way back to the right, on the round table, and you'll see...

now that's love...

I taught the "bigger boys": Do a job, big or small, do it right or not at all. That's part of What Else But Home is about.

I know there are other great places and great book peoples out there, and I'm heading those ways.