“New Sign at Sarah's Bookstore”

 

  We wondered about the origin of the new sign down at the Read Me Now bookstore. Sarah McKinley has had the place for about five years now and has become a real asset to our valley. If you’re looking for a book, she either has it or you don’t need to read it.

  She is picky, of course, and tends to buy the kind of books she thinks we should read and not always the ones we’d like to read. Fortunately for her, enough of us agree with her choices that we have kept her in business.

  There’s speculation about the new sign, naturally. The word got out around the valley about ten minutes after she hung it up, which is probably pretty slow for news to spread around here. She might have done it during a playoff game.

  We all made the pilgrimage into the store to glance at it. No one was crass enough to actually ask Sarah about the wording on the sign. For one thing, it’s none of our business, really. Not that that would stop us. But if we pried, that would take away all the fun we’d have out of speculating about it (sometimes known as gossip) at the barbershop, coffee shop, hair stylists and kitchens throughout the local realm.

  I’ve heard through a good source (who swears it’s true) that the sign is a direct result of a broken heart when that fellow who used to come see Sarah moved out of state. That isn’t actual evidence, of course, but evidence would require asking Sarah about the sign, and that would spoil the fun.

  Some say Sarah had problems with men at an even earlier age, and a few of our local ladies claim to have seen photographs in Sarah’s apartment of several former swains. (Is the plural of swain swine?)

  I’ve caught Sarah looking at us as we glance at the sign when we come in. I believe I’ve seen a semi smirk on her face at those times, too. But at any rate, I don’t know of another bookstore that has a sign proclaiming one wall of books as being in the category of “Love and other Fiction.”

Brought to you by any love secret you might have come across in Slim Randles’ book “Growing Up Right.”

 

Newspaper columnist Slim Randles, who writes the weekly Home Country column, took home two New Mexico Book Awards in 2011. His advice book for young people, “A Cowboy’s Guide to Growing Up Right,” took first place in the self-help category, and “Sweetgrass Mornings” won in the biography/memoirs category. Randles lives and works in Albuquerque. Home Country reaches 3 million hometown newspaper readers each week

Slim Randles learned mule packing from Gene Burkhart and Slim Nivens. He learned mustanging and wild burro catching from Hap Pierce. He learned horse shoeing from Rocky Earick. He learned horse training from Dick Johnson and Joe Cabral. He learned humility from the mules of the eastern High Sierra. Randles lives in Albuquerque.

Randles has written newspaper stories, magazine articles and book, both fiction and nonfiction. His column appeared in New Mexico Magazine for many years and was a popular columnist for the Anchorage Daily News and the Albuquerque Journal, and now writes a nationally syndicated column, “Home Country,” which appears in several hundred newspapers across the country.

 

  Huntington Beach News