chessandlena.com

Saturday:
Slept in for a while. Owwwh yeeeah. Woke up, only had to referee one cat fight. Lena and I went out for lubrunch at Klemm's Kafe on Wells Street... crummy coffee, excellent garbage omelet. Heavy on green and red peppers... was delicious.

While eating, I looked down the street and was whacked with a wall of nostalgia for my childhood in various places in Wheeling and Elm Grove. The buildings, as Lena put it, look rather run down, but once you get inside... well, they still look rather run down. But there's stuff in them! When my brother and I were kids, weekends would sometimes consist of Dad taking us to the army-navy store or the used book store in downtown Wheeling if it were saturday... or hockey then Isaly's bakery for apple turnovers if it were sunday.

In today's Fort Wayne on Wells Street, there is a used furniture store directly across from the kafe... nothing caught my eye, but they did have eight-track tapes. The real treasure is next door, where hyde bros quietly holds a trove of excellent-condition used books. We spent well over an hour in there, and I probably could have spent the whole damn day. The store is labyrinthine but well-ordered in its shelving organization. You go down the stairs, turn this corner, enter this room, wind around this wall, follow this aisle, and just when you think you've reached the end, there's another damn section of the maze. It felt like Borges' Library of Babel.

The real piece de resistance was that I found something there that has been out of print for decades: A good number of the Rick Brant Science-Adventure books (yes, I'm channeling Ross Geller here). I had three of them-- the Whispering Box Mystery, the Phantom Shark, and Smuggler's Reef-- growing up, but lost them in the mists of time, moving, garage sales, and siblings. They were excellent books, all the feel of a Heinlein Sci-fi juvenile, but without the orgies. Anyway, I'd never read any but those three... and Hyde Bros has about ten of them. At around 5-7 bucks apiece, I'm probably going to snag all the copies I can. But this weekend I just got the first three.

After all the Wells Street bustle, we took a bike ride round the greenway. We turned around at the filtration plant as the gates were locked; though there was a detour, we decided it was probably about the right time to go back... good thing, too. Our bike seats are of the Very Painful variety, and after an hour on them, the intra-assital region starts to feel it. We rode for two and a half-- it still hurts for me to sit down. Hmm... reminds me of work.

Anyway. All in all, serious unexpected nostalgic Saturday. Good stuff, with just a hint of sad longing thrown in for spice.