My teenage dream was so simple. Regardless of any profession I would choose after my graduation, I wanted to be an owner of a small book shop where people could come and deal old books of any kind. I loved those old books and couldn't get enough of them. Even their looks, and the smell of them in an old books shop could make me absolutely fall for them.
And the atmosphere in any typical old books shop is, regardless of the place, almost always the same. Books on shelves, books in heaps, books in good condition and books in bad condition and usually, more often than not, there would be a nice, quiet old man at an old table somewhere in the shop, reading some book. As you entered his shop, he would have a glance at you and then would be back at his reading. You would get the feeling that the glance he gave was like he was looking at a fellow bookworm entering 'the club ' and no more word needed to say, the glance was more than enough. It gave you a warm feeling that was like saying, “Please enjoy! Old books for very reasonable prices.”
Sometimes, especially on winter nights, I would be going about those shops in different blocks of my hometown, one after another, sometimes not buying any book from them or not selling any book to them, just flipping through books. There could be two or three other such people happened to be with me in a shop. No one would say anything to us. At those times, the shopkeeper would kindly smile at me and say, “'Didn't find anything interesting” and then surprise me by saying that some those other old books, by a specific writer that I liked was on the way to his shop even now and would be here by such and such time. He would tell me to come back on a certain day for they were keeping those books for me for such low prices. Lol!
I used to think that they were just absorbed in the books they were readin, and didn't care much other than that about their customers, because, for the amount of money they got from us was so small. To my surprise, that wasn't the case at all, they kept it in their heart when it came to which reader loved the works of which authors.
In Mandalay, my hometown, those old book dealing shops have somehow managed to survive. Whenever I got back there, I would haunt them, buying books. Yes, old habits die hard!
When I asked my old friends, the shopkeepers about the conditions of their business they would uniformly tell me, ''Ah yes, our businesses are dying, as we are in our old age. We keep up our work, for this is our love and our life. Nice to see you again old boy! Please take some books for free as my present.”
I could have been one of them. They remembered me as a long, lost boy. They opened up their hearts to me. I could see them feeling sorry thatthe old days were gone.
Ah yes...I could have been a dreamer.
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