Goodbye to…

Goodbye to, Goodbye to... Mister Goodbar, was that it? It was a thick paperback novel—maybe a play? I remember being a kid, just a kid, in the bookstore, Kepler’s, and there was a buzz around that book. I hadn’t read it, but I can see the cover. Penguin Books? A white cover with a photo of a bench and a man in a dark trench coat.

Goodbye to those days, being a child in the massive concrete bookstore, and all the taboos on those shelves, all the laughing voices of my parents’ colleagues there. That was the very center of the universe. All the weight of minds and hearts settled to their center in that space. It really was THE place to be.

I didn’t understand most of the conversations or references~ I was too little~ but I did absorb the different moods and impressions. Here on the top shelf of Religion are the bibles, unopened, with glossy gold edges to each page. Here is Erotica. Here’s Gardening and Do It Yourself. The spinning rack of postcards, hand drawn— these I could understand.

My favorite was a simple ink drawing of an arrow and a target with a bullseye, and the handwritten message: “Shoot, and wherever your arrow lands, that’s your target.”

It was in print, and in those days 1970’s, that still meant it must be true.

I was seven, eight years old. The rows of Fiction were like the future to me. The Children’s section was wonderful, of course, colorful and sweet, but I climbed the YA (young adult) with all my heart’s reach.

Note: The novel Looking for Mr Goodbar by Judith Rossner was published in 1975 and probably reissued in 1977 when the movie came out. I was 7 yrs old. The book cover is an image of a woman lying naked in bed and looks nothing like I remember.