The Eternal Dance of the Optimist

Hello.

You know, every time I enter Booth and Noble, my heart sings a little song. Sometimes it sings a happy song, like "Heaven is a Place on Earth." Other times, it sings a more dour song, like "Enter Sandman." Yesterday, when I walked into Booth and Noble, my heart sung "Que, Sera, Sera."

See, despite all my misgivings, all my misfortunes, all my mis-steps, I still enjoy working at Booth and Noble. I am ever an optimist, hoping against hope that one day someone will walk in with a surprisingly urbane, decently well-thought out request for a book, DVD or CD that doesn't make my toes curl with shocking horror.

Yesterday was not one of those days.

Part of the problem was that I just kept overhearing some of the most painful conversations imaginable. You can't help but overhear conversations when you work at Booth and Noble: the trouble is, people are just too loud in a bookstore. Because there are chairs and tables, perhaps they think it is their home , so they don't feel like they need to be quiet. Or buy anything. Or flush the toilet.

For example, it's not long ago that I overheard a mother and her child having the following conversation in the children's department:

Mother: Perhaps we should tell Stephen that we're going to get ice cream.
Child: But we don't like Stephen!
Mother: I know, but he might want to come.
Child: But we keep our ice cream a secret from Stephen!
Mother: Well, I'm not the one who tells Stephen about the ice cream after we have it.
Child: It's not my fault!
Mother: But you do tell him our secret.
Child: But I like ice cream and I hate Stephen!

I don't know who this Stephen fellow is, but believe me, he is much happier not knowing that this runt and his mother are going to get ice cream. Perhaps Stephen will live out his life happy, living in peaceful ignorance that Mother and Child are two rotten people who deliberately keep ice cream away from other children, hoarding it for their own consumption, not realizing that soon, all too soon, they will die from a stupid ferret in a hat.

But that overheard conversation was the least of my problems. The most? A racist baseball fan.

One thing that disturbs me about baseball fans is that many of them assume that you, as well, are a baseball fan. It's like going to a foreign country and assuming that everyone there speaks English. Sure, it's a pretty good bet that they do, but to assume it is to show your complete lack of manners.

It's the same with baseball.

A man came up to me at the information kiosk and asked for a book. He was an old man, with thinning hair covering a pulpy mound of scalpy flesh. His ears jutted out like the sides of a gothic goblet, but because he was only five feet tall, he resembled one of the rejected dwarves who didn't get to hang out with Snow White (see, there were originally 12 dwarves, but only seven of them passed the test: Happy, Sleepy, Doc, Grumpy, Sneezy, Bashful and Dopey. The fact that Dopey made it through the test tells you something about the other 5. Basically, each of the other five dwarves were just horrible victims of fate. Angry the Dwarf was cursed with a short temper and huge, sweaty feet. Hungry the Dwarf was as round as he was tall, and had no friends because he couldn't fit through the door to leave his dwarf house. Flappy the Dwarf literally had no bones and one day was eaten by a tortoise . Freebasin' the Dwarf grew up on the wrong side of the dwarf train tracks and eventually OD'd. And then there was Hobbley the Dwarf, who had a bald head and nothing else. This is all that was found of him).

Anyway, um, where was I? Oh yeah...so this old dwarfish man with the thinning hair comes up to me as asks,

"Yankees or Sox?"

But what I hear is,

"Yank up your socks."

Now, I was standing behind the Information Kiosk, and there was no way he could see my socks. So I asked him to repeat himself, stunned that this dwarf would tell me how to wear my stockings. He repeats himself and I understand this second time. Because I don't want to admit that I know nothing about baseball, I arbitrarily guess that the answer he wants is "Yankees."

It was not the answer that he wanted. He got this pained look in his face like he was passing a kidney stone the size of a truck.


He starts to yell at me about why he hates the Yankees. Turns out, the reason he hates the Yankees is because they're run by Jews. Yup, gotta love them greedy Baseball Jews! .

But when I asked him about the Boston Red Sox, he replied that the reason he liked them was because they had just hired a "great new Jap pitcher," who can "throw a ball" even though "he has short Jap arms."

That's not even a racist stereotype I know! I know Japanese people are fond of sleeping with arms , but as for having proportionally smaller arms? That's just confusing.

Anyway, I politely extricated myself from the conversation and walked over to another stack of books. He left me alone, but I watched him leave the story. He started singing "Que, Sera, Sera."