Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end

Thursday was the day we mark our relationship's anniversary, the 16th. We give cards for that. Sometimes small tokens. I gave something I'd gotten in one of East Lansing's two used book stores, both run by the same guy: the 1959 Lansing City Directory. It's threatening to be more interesting to bunnyhugger than Octopath Traveller II, pinball, me, and our pet rabbit are combined. But who wouldn't want to look up all sorts of trivia about what used to be here, and discover things like buildings listed on the street of ``North Detroit'' which does not exist except --- we can find a logical path for it, flanking buildings that are still there, and that leads all the way to a minor alley on the side of a neighborhood street.

Later in the day, after work, we went to one of those bookstores, Archives. It's the one not downtown. Not just for the pleasure of being in a bookstore, though. Leap Day 2024 was to be its last day, as the owner was closing down from two stores to just the one as part of, you know, he's getting older and has been at this a long time and it's nice sometimes to be doing less of a thing, even if it's going fine.

Which is how we ended up spending the last hour-plus of the store's regular operating hours. (It's continuing for some unspecified while as being open by-appointment. They also have a GoFundMe going to help cover the costs of closing, which makes sense but feels superficially like a thing I should wish to see fail.) The bookstore had a handful of people in, many taking pictures with their big, serious-grade cameras, which made me feel less awkward about taking some snaps of my own. And bunnyhugger much less worried about bringing her analog-film camera in to take pictures but noisy.

The bookstore was --- well, you've seen used bookstores. Lot of aisles that don't quite go the whole length of the store before a new aisle spacing takes over. Boxes and boxes heaped atop each other in the aisles, so that the bottommost shelves are inaccessible and so the whole place is inaccessible to anyone with slight mobility problems. They don't have a bookstore cat (nor does the downtown store) and they focused more on rare books and maps and postcards and all. bunnyhugger didn't realize they had so much ephemera --- advertising pamphlets for county zoos from 2004, souvenir postcards from motels, that kind of thing --- and spent a long time looking through postcards, discovering for example that apparently for decades there every Ann Arbor postcard was of a hospital building.

We ended up spending to about a half-hour after the nominal closing time, without the owner saying anything grumpy. (He was talking amiably with people who were also buying things and discussing whether they were needed to move boxes, so can't have been too bothered.) I can't swear for sure this is true, but, I believe that we were the last two people to buy something at the shop, with bunnyhugger and the two postcards she selected the last cash purchase. He gave her change including a crisp two dollar bill, chuckling about did we even know what that was, besides a way to advertise the store's quirkiness.

And now, so far as we know, that's all done, although if we wanted to make an appointment I suppose we have a little while left. Have to check on the GoFundMe to be sure, I guess.

---

No pictures today. I want to use the time getting ready for explaining Alley Oop for tomorrow as there's a pinball event I know about tomorrow evening that will demand that time.

Trivia: In January 1922 US President Warren G Harding had an attack of what was diagnosed as influenza; it was likely a coronary thromobosis. In autumn 1922 the heart specialist and diagnostician Dr Emmanuel Libmann met Harding at a dinner party, and subsequently told a friend Harding was ``suffering from a disease of the coronary arteries of the heart and would be dead in six months''. Harding lasted eight. Source: The Year We Had No President, Richard Hansen. (The exact cause of Harding's death cannot be known, even by the standards of 1923, as his wife refused an autopsy.)

Currently Reading: The Address Book: What Street Addresses Reveal About Identity, Race, Wealth, and Power, Deirdre Mask.