The missing book

The clerk stood behind his information desk, staring at the bookshelves as if he expected the books to tumble out the second a customer distracted him with a request. After my encore "Excuse me," he sighed quietly and looked down at me. (I was the only other person in the store.)

"Do you have Peter Ackroyd's history of the Thames?"

He tilted his head and took off his glasses to clean them; if we'd been in the poetry section, I would've said this act symbolized thought. As it was, we were closer to the DIY section, so probably it just meant they were dirty. After he put them back on, he said, "You know, I think we do. No, I'm sure of it." He glanced one last time at the Self-Help section, as one would at a dog after telling it to heel, and bounded over to History. "I remember seeing it in the computer the other day...it said we had one copy left." He went over each row, and then shook his head. "I could swear we had one copy left."

"Maybe it's just in the wrong section?"

"No, that wouldn't be it. Someone's probably knicked it." He went back to his desk. "See, the computer says we have one copy left." He stared at the computer. "But that's wrong, because now I remember someone asked for it last week, and it said then we had one copy left, but we didn't. Yeah, quite a few people have come in asking for it, now that I think of it." He shrugged. "I don't know why the computer keeps saying we have one copy left."

He perched his fingers on the desk and resumed his observation of the bookshelves.

I asked, "Are you going to order it?"

"Hmm? Oh yes, I've been meaning to do that. Good idea. I'll do that right now."

I wonder how long that bookstore will stay in business.

Why the rug doesn't match the curtains

I went to the bathroom store and bought a bathmat. I told the lady how I liked the light green color, but it was safest to go with white, because once I bought a green rug to go with the green curtains in my bedroom, only to find when I got home that they were blue. And the rug was such a putrid green.

You wonder sometimes at garage sales what possessed people to buy some of the things – that rug was one of those things.