In Memoriam
Saying goodbye to a loyal Prairie Lights customer and thinking about transitions this holiday weekend
Writing updates: No new writing this past week other than a couple of journal entries…in a bit of a fallow season after resubmitting Gate Mouth to an interested agent and two manuscript contests (Autumn House Press + Trio House Press). Planning to do another close-read of the manuscript during my upcoming residency and submit to the contest for Vine Leaves Press before the end of June.
Hi everyone. I hope you’re enjoying the long holiday weekend so far and getting some much-needed rest. I’m personally quite excited that I don’t have to teach my adjunct ELL class on Monday and can take a little extra time for myself.
Already, my schedule’s been slowing down a bit, thanks to fewer readings at Prairie Lights. (We had a fantastic one last night with Alice Martin and Rachel Yoder, though—if you weren’t there, you missed out!) I cherish this time of year because the summer break is so lovely in Iowa City. Our local customers keep supporting us, but we get a lot of out-of-town visitors too, especially those in town for Arts Fest (coming up soon!), the Rogue Workshops through Authors-at-Large (a kind of spin-off of the former Iowa Summer Writing Festival—which I hear is planning to make a comeback in 2027!), and the summer Writers’ Workshop sessions. Creative energy abounds here in summertime.
As we get ready for another summer season, I’m thinking of a loyal Prairie Lights customer we lost this past week. To protect his privacy, I won’t use his real name—let’s call him Al for now. One of my colleagues told me at the beginning of my Friday night shift that Al passed suddenly while hospitalized; another longtime PL customer who knew him well passed on the news.
If you’ve been coming to Prairie Lights often over the past few years—especially to any of our readings—then you probably saw Al around. He was a sweet, gentle-natured man who often fell asleep in one of our leather chairs with a book in his lap. He always asked at least one question during each in-store reading, and I could tell from his abundant literary references (which I think he liked to include as a preamble to each question as a point of pride) that he was extremely well-read. Al knew every Prairie Lights bookseller by name and said hello to each of us every night he was there—which, since I’ve been working at the bookstore these past two years, was almost every night.
As sweet as Al was, he wasn’t always the easiest customer. Sometimes he fell asleep during a reading (while sitting in the front row), and occasionally he snored. Loudly. None of our visiting authors ever complained, but we booksellers felt awkward, as you might imagine. Al also had a habit of treating Prairie Lights as his second home, which meant he didn’t always respect typical customer boundaries. I saw him use our staff bathroom a few times (without asking first), and he even used our employee stairwell on occasion. These were minor enough things that I never called him out (especially since I knew he was in good standing with Jan), but I often wondered about his personal life and what drove him to spend nearly every hour we were open in our bookstore, away from home.
Once, on a snowy December night, Al was leaning on the register counter at closing time, clearly not wanting to leave. I asked if he was okay. He asked if he could use our bathroom again. He’d been in there for some time and had just left five minutes ago.
“I’m so sorry,” I said, trying to sound gentle. “We’re closing, Al.”
He nodded and sighed with a heavy mix of exhaustion and determination. I said goodnight to him and watched as he slung his collection of grocery bags over his shoulders and trudged out into the snow.
My colleagues and I suspected he was partially houseless, but we never knew for sure. Later, I would learn through one longtime bookseller that Al actually had a house up in Cedar Falls, but it was apparently uninhabitable because he’d become a hoarder at some point.
Al was hospitalized weeks ago, and none of us saw him again. Apparently, the other customer who had looked after him for years saw Al in his hospital room the day before he died and said he was in good spirits and looked well. A nurse found him unresponsive the next morning.
I thought of Al last night during Alice’s reading and how much he would have enjoyed it. We had a full house, but one chair in the front row remained empty. I liked to think Al was there in spirit, listening.
Back when I worked for the Catherine McAuley Center, there was a sudden death among our network of volunteers. The man was young, under forty, and he’d been such an incredible presence at the CMC that most of the staff attended his celebration of life ceremony. I’d only just started working there (part-time and mostly remote), so I didn’t know this person, but I could see he was dearly missed. During a staff meeting the following week, my education director said, “We’re a people business, and sometimes that means we have to face losing people.” That sentence stuck with me. It occurs to me now that bookselling is also a people-business, and at times a rather intimate one. I’ve gotten to know several customers over the past couple of years, and remembering that we’re all mortal and that any of us could walk in or out of the bookstore for the last time is…humbling.
Memorial Day is a day meant to honor fallen soldiers, but in the U.S. it seems to have morphed into a day of remembrance for pretty much anyone we’ve lost. This was always the weekend Dad took my sister and I out to the county cemetery after his parents passed…first his father when I was nine, then his mother when I was fourteen. I helped him plant flowers at each of his parents’ graves during Memorial Day weekend for years, until I graduated high school and moved away for college. I’m thinking of that ritual today and wondering if anyone will plant flowers at Al’s grave, wherever that may be.
I’m too far away from my grandparents’ graves to plant flowers for them this weekend, but I plan to spend my extra day off with my partner and a few of my Prairie Lights colleagues…we’re going to have a little hangout in my backyard, just sit around a fire pit and share stories. I can’t think of a better way to honor the life I have now than to do that. I hope you have someone to share your holiday with, too.
