Reading Between the Adult Lines

Be back in 10 minutes.

I read the sign and took a sip of the stagnant pumpkin spice latte reproduction in my hand. There was something so comforting about those organic words scribbled on a taped piece of paper in cursive. Who uses cursive anymore?

I could have cared less for the drink in my hand. Sustenance for the immediate and not necessarily something that produced longterm comfort.

The house in front of me exuded a welcoming atmosphere despite being confined by lock and bolt. I was standing on one of the more sleepy busy streets of Port Moody. I say that because the busy portion of that oxymoron comes from the rushes of traffic that plague the commuter corridor onto the highway. The sleepiness comes from all the quaint treasures that await finding in the forgotten houses turned into businesses. Yep, this would be my neighbourhood.

Few stop to look and pay attention. The used bookstores, a forgotten place tell a story of their own: stories of people taking home library books and being too embarrassed to turn them into the library so they sell them to a used book collector; stories of university students burning the oils of the midnight hour furiously trying to figure out what Shakespeare meant in his witty quips in olde English; stories of those who pride themselves of having a collection of classics that never get read; stories of young children eager to learn to use their budding artistic talents, loaded with more potential and less confined by the conventions of drawing within the adult lines.

Lately I have found that the adult lines is an interesting concept. Ones that we fit within not necessarily by choice but by necessity of survival and the nature of how old our physical beings are. I had a really interesting conversation with one of my friends recently and we were talking about the concept of being a teenager. They pointed out that being a teenager was a concept that didn’t exist in previous timeframes in history.

I thought about it for a while and realized just how accurate this observation is. Many different cultures have rites of passage to define being young and old but that’s just it: what defines a teenager. It’s a moderate adaptation to the fact that we don’t want to grow up and we don’t necessarily have to if someone else is going to do the adult thing for us.

Some will live as forever young at heart and grow up. Some will live as forever young in every aspect of life and choose to never grow up. Others were born grown up and there was no going back. The old souls and the fresh souls; we all make up the orchestra of life.

The choice is ours to step up and embrace age. To age gracefully is a beautiful thing. I hope that I can accept the wisdom with the tides of time yet still honour my memory of what it was like to be young, just so that I don’t pigeon hole my relational dialogue with others. But as I stood there in front of that monumental home turned business with the chipped paint, partially sealed windows with the warped glass and the worn stoop and the wood framed door with the bell hanging over head, the comfort washed over me.

The comfort of knowing that despite the fact that at one point this store was brimming full of people and was something different at one point in time, it wasn’t trying to be something it wasn’t. It wasn’t trying too hard. The character was ingrained into the wood. It was a used bookstore and it was just exactly that. It would always be simple and I now know the gravitational pull of that.

A book will always be a book. And although the denouement occurs, it stops when you close the cover and you can come back to it another day. So, yes, I will resume perusing with the hardcovered classics section in 10 minutes.

I turned on my heel and headed on my way knowing I wouldn't be able to resist coming back.