The Grove Project

Being and Being Local

As small business owners in a little town in California, my wife and I were fortunate to have customers who shopped at our bookstore as a matter of principle, who amazed us by reading our newsletter and diligently carrying out its buying suggestions, who special ordered books they could have picked off the shelf at a new Barnes & Noble a few miles down the road—who were our patrons in the fullest sense of that word. With our small and impractically eclectic inventory, it was obvious we were sometimes putting these do-gooders out, making them wait a week for a Jane Smiley novel there were literally walls of just down the road, or making them (especially) pay full price or something close to it for a book that was basically being wholesaled at the big boxes.

We didn’t say no. We needed those benefactors. But we wished we didn’t, and we felt sheepish. As much as we struggled with the business, I didn’t want our bookstore to be a cause. Rains leeched the ugly ceiling tiles in ominous, sepia Rohrshachs and filled the tinkling bottles on the mildewed carpet in winter. Sometimes, we faced all the books in the cases out to make the supply look thicker, or else chronically brought in much more of a kind of book—poetry, say—than we could ever sell, which is Business 101 suicide. Our little store bathroom smelled like cat shit most of the time (Our pet cat Fellini lived at the bookstore and sat in laps during store hours). We kept buying books we liked, we kept holding little events and clubs and readings, kept struggling, dodged creditors, kept reading.

The system wasn’t working right when customers’ needs weren’t being satisfied. That was our nagging feeling. The guiding, invisible hand was held in abeyance by…charity. At that point in my life, in that relation to things, the word charity seemed like a dirty one. We were dependents when we were struggling so hard to be independents, to be a little independent bookstore, an honest part of the economy. The laws of supply and demand were inverted—or perverted, I thought—and it was our demands and our patrons’ supply of patronage that were being exchanged.

Now it’s years later and we’re living in Wilmington, NC, and I feel different about things. We’re on the other side now, my wife and I. We are patrons. And charity, I realize, is the least of it. We are not condescending to the local stores and services we patronize; we are not donating. Au contraire. As a patron and a father and, after four years here, a new local, I think I see that our customers back then were acting perfectly rational, were Adam Smith-ians after all, but satisfying a variety of self-interest I wasn’t mature enough or perceptive enough (or confused enough?) to appreciate:

Commercial exchanges can be mere echoes, like religious rites whose original meanings have been lost or obscured. Trade is an exchange of value, and our system is structured to ensure that the value on both sides is quickly commensurate. But the market works in sneaky ways, making our choices seem too few, or too many, convincing us that ridiculous things are necessary, pressure-forming the notion of value into a caricature of itself, into “deals” and savings and speed and ease unto inertia.

You give money to get value, and you get what you give.

If you think the only thing Wilmington’s Indochine has over Ruby Tuesday is its food, for example, you’re a dummy. Or a philistine. The experience at that funky Southeast Asian restaurant on Market street, middle of nowhere, is so manifoldly better than a trip to the local, could-be-anywhere chain restaurant that if you’re a frequent flyer at Ruby’s or at TGIFridays, say—as we abjectly thought we “might should be” when we first moved here (I have to tell a story about TGIFridays as well. Remind me.)—you may have already alienated yourself right out of your own boots! You’re floating and unbelonging along. And I should know because I float along 96% of the time too. Indochine and other local businesses provide real value, and I don’t mind “paying extra” for them one bit, paying for books at the local bookstore. What’s in those books you’re buying for half off at the big box anyway—how to win more friends? How to live healthier? Is it a novel you read to feel more connected to others, or more authentic? For God sakes, what kind of investigative practice is that, if the circumstances under which you purchased these objects was Super-Saver?

So of course I don’t see this “extra” as charity at all (anymore). You get what you give. Pomegranate Books, Tidal Creek, Zone Eight Nursery, Two Wheeler Dealer, little wine shops, downtown businesses in general—these are not my cause, I am their cause! Rather, our mutual cause is living well, actually living in an environment of real value and exchange and humanness and human pleasure, the kind written about in books and organized for your consumption in good eateries and friendly gas stations and other beneficent, reciprocating transactions. I hope they don’t think I’m being “charitable” as a patron, these businesses—I’m trying to belong, I’m trying to save myself! I’m just happy they open the doors for me. It’s pure self-interest. I wouldn’t presume to know about your soul, but for me, existence can seem pretty tenuous sometimes. The floating around. I’m not sure I exist or am real. Or real enough. Or worse: The questions of existence and realness do not arise for me for large stretches. (A related paradox I am trying to write about: the paradox of materialism and its disdain). But sometimes, all that stuff about online “worlds” and myspace and globalization and post-literacy and sexy, techno-tribalism and chat emoticons—it all just seems like a bunch of baby-talk to me when I take part in my community, when I belong. I feel most myself when those things seem irrelevant, or fraudulent, or banal. (And, to do the math above, this particular myself-ness is happening to me like 4% of the time.)

Existence is not guaranteed to us, I guess you could say. You have to work at existence by existing—in some particular place, in some body, in some set of failures and contingencies. And exchanges. If you are, then you are somewhere, you’re local or can be local. Wilmington affords so many opportunities to be, and to belong, and to benefit and “benefact”–there’s no reason just to float around.