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.

But look deeper into Wilmington’s street names and you’ll see a bit of everything – history, whimsy, reverence, nature, and not a few puzzlers. I decided to look deeper into this, and with the help of Google maps cataloged many of the city’s streets in several groupings. This started with a couple of obscure streets that have now become more visible since the opening of Costco. Just behind that Big Box are two streets called Lennon and Ringo. Try as you might, however, you won’t find the other two Mop Tops anywhere in the city. “Imagine” and “Yellow Submarine” yes, but no “Yesterday” or “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.”

When I called the city to discuss street names I spoke with a young woman who was basically no help at all as to their origins. “I’m only 24-years-old,” she said. “I think you might need to speak with a gray-haired old man about this.” She named a few but couldn’t provide contact information. I pushed on.

As in most cities the natural world inspires many street names, and we’re covered there. We have birds (Oriole Drive, Red Wing Lane, Marsh Hawk Drive, Eagles Nest, Sparrow Hawk Road, etc), fish (Cobia Drive, Tarpon Drive, Sea Robin Drive, etc) and flowers (Carnation Court, Crocus Court, Lilac Court, Zinnia Court, Foxglove Court). As my young friend in the City of Wilmington offices noted, rather disdainfully, “Most cities will have names like those.”

But the Port City, conflicted as its history is, also has a large bypass called Martin Luther King, Jr. Blvd. to go along with a small dirt road off Carolina Beach Road called Rosa Parks Lane. These relatively recent homages to two civil rights stalwarts stand incongruously against many streets named for Civil War generals. There’s an entire neighborhood devoted to Robert E. Lee and his fellow comrades in arms — Longstreet, Pickett, Hood, Reilly and Chalmers. Some get the full name treatment, like the aforementioned Lee (of course) but also Jeb Stuart and Stonewall Jackson. One general is a relatively obscure name, a chap called Bedford Forest. According to his Wikipedia entry, Mr. Forest “was a lieutenant general in the Confederate Army during the American Civil War. A divisive figure, he is remembered both as a cavalry leader and a leading figure in the postbellum Ku Klux Klan.” For the record, Wilmington also has a Lincoln Road and a North Lincoln Court.
When I brought mentioned these road names to my Wilmington bureacrat friend, she spat, “Are you from here?” Turns out she’s not from here either but she seemed to think I was attempting to start a race war. When I disabused her of this notion by explaining that I was just curious about street name origins, she calmed down a bit.

I moved onto a less controversial but no less curious topic. The city seems to have a fascination with all things English (the Beatles notwithstanding). The British Invasion also includes Lord Tennyson Road, Shakespeare Drive, Dickens Drive, Shelley Drive, Canterbury Road, Scarborough Drive, Hampshire Drive, Tottenham Court. Not content with mere English history, Wilmington street-namers also hung their hat on British legend: Consider Robin Hood Road, Little John Circle, and Sherwood Drive.

Fittingly enough, we also have a pirate theme (Buccaneer Road, West and East Blackbeard Road), and a war theme (Bunker Circle and Infantry Road). There’s a Control Tower Drive as well, which sits just across from the bucolically identified Deer Creek Lane (must everyone practice irony?)

Native Americans are remembered with a bevy of trails (Navaho, Cherokee, Mohawk, Seminole, Mohican), none of which are named for any local tribes.

I’ll end with these head-scratchers: Booger Woods Road and Lame. Like New York, they decided to name the latter twice, as in Lame Street and Lame Avenue.

Does any of this mean anything or have any bearing on the pulse of a city? Probably not. But Google Maps has this effect on people.

[where: Wilmington, NC]

We were discussing Baja, books, wine, but paying scant attention to the pouring list, having a wonderful time and even thinking we’d like to interview this Luba (“Russian for liebe!”, as she said) for the Grove Project, when an older woman in big lips and a furry pastel sweater muscled her way to the bar between us and began monopolizing our conversation with German “du bist schlau” wink-winks and heavy geographical name-checking. This woman, a Ms. Freeman, had us know that she was there with Curtis White, host of “The Big Talker” and self-professed “Bill O’Reilly of Wilmington”, and that they had just come from a filming at WWAY of their show Carolina Talk, in which Mr. White interviews local politicians and others.

We all of course began talking politics and Luba said how bad she thought Bush was and of course we agreed and Ms. Freeman did not and in this larger, national context Luba said something really racist about African-Americans and the future of our nation, and Ms. Freeman just lit up and was, according to this journalist, positively gleeful to deliver this factoid she’d just heard from our own police chief in the interview she and Curtis White had come from (she is the producer of Carolina Talk, apparently), which is that 90% of all violent crime is committed by blacks, who make up only 24% of the population.

I said to Ms. Freeman that she looked like she was relishing these statistics. Suddenly she started talking about how beleaguered she felt as a German-American, said that Germans like her mother had bricks thrown through their windows and were accused of being nazis, cited the TV show Hogan’s Heroes, &cetera. Said that media was rife with these negative, duck-walking portrayals of blond-haired blue-eyed Germans, that that made them all feel like animals. And I said she sounded like she was being evasive, like she was claiming some victim’s rights in order to continue slurring blacks. I told her she was ridiculous and that it sounded like she thought that German-Americans were worse off than African-Americans, and she said yes, she did think so.

Luba—Luba in the ermine gloves and go-go boots—with whom we’d been having such a great conversation, was positively abject at the turn the conversation had taken at the hands of the tactless, presumptuous Ms. Freeman. So were we.

[where: 28401]