Buford Highway Recollections

Book Nook as it appears now, in its current location on North Druid Hills road

In the early 1980s, my cousin and friend Scott and I would go on book-buying trips down Buford Highway once a month or so. (At least I remember it as being that often and that regular. Maybe it's something we only did three or four times…but I remember it as being every month or so for a period of a year or so. Also, for me they were book-buying trips, but I think Scott was actually more interested in looking for records.) Sometimes we'd go on a Saturday, sometimes on a weekday afternoon after school—most of the time when this was a regular event for us, we were both still in high school at Berkmar, me in ninth or tenth grade and him in eleventh or twelfth.

The high spot of these trips was Book Nook. Back then it used to be where Clairmont intersects Buford Highway. (Some years ago, it moved to—and still occupies—a building on North Druid Hills, which is fine, and I still go there two or three times a year, but I liked the old location better.) Book Nook was a large used bookstore with a great SF/fantasy section, and probably quite a lot of other types of books, too, but I don't remember because I never looked anywhere else. I do remember, though, that you had to go by—or was it through?—the comic books to get to the SF bookcases. (Book Nook is still a large used bookstore, and it still has a pretty good SF/fantasy section, but now when I go there I also go to several other sections, and also in their current location you don't have to go through the comic books to get to the science fiction shelves.)

When I was in high school, I used to go to the library during my study hall period and look at the original 1977 Science Fiction Encyclopedia—still my favorite edition, primarily because of the illustrations, which were omitted from the mid-90s update. I loved that book; I read more about science fiction than I actually read science fiction. Sometime in the mid-80s, a year or two after Scott and I had pretty much stopped going on our Buford Highway excursions, on a Book Nook visit with my first girlfriend, Laura, I found a copy of the Encyclopedia, and I pounced on it, though I was (and still am) a little disappointed that it didn't have the dust jacket. I can't remember how much it cost, or whether I was able to buy it right away or if I had to go back later (hoping all the while that no one else had gotten to it before me, I'm sure) with the right amount of money. More than thirty years later, I still love that book.

Besides Book Nook, there were at least two other places Scott and I would go regularly. One of them was also a used bookstore; I remember going there one afternoon and finding a copy of Harlan Ellison's landmark anthology Dangerous Visions and thinking I'd found a real prize. I realized years later that it was just a cheap and fairly common book club edition, but I still have that copy, and have read…oh, maybe a fourth of it in the thirty-five years since I bought it. (I've always been guilty of spending more money buying books than time reading them.)

Three books I still have that I know I bought at bookstores along Buford Highway in the 1980s

The other store I remember Scott and me going to on Buford Highway was primarily a used record store—I remember Scott buying an ABBA record there once—but they might have had used books too. I can vaguely picture the inside of the store, but not its location along Buford Highway. I can also remember the owner of the store, as he rang up Scott's ABBA record, telling him about how the members of ABBA spoke no English and learned all their songs phonetically but didn't know what they were singing. Scott just nodded and said, "Oh, really, that's interesting," but as soon as we left the store he told me that was a load of crap (which I'm pretty sure I already knew).

I recall one time on a Saturday Scott and I had lunch at the McDonald's that was near Book Nook, and as we ate, Mike Beaty and Toni Pecoraro, two guys we knew from Berkmar, came in. Mike had a huge afro—look at Neal Schon on the back of a late 70s Journey album—and Tony had shoulder length hair. The both played guitar and were in a band together. I know now that they were just a couple of teenagers, not very different from any other teenagers, but at the time I thought they were rock stars. I don't remember if we talked to them, or if they even acknowledged our presence.

I still occasionally drive down Buford Highway, usually just for nostalgia's sake, since all the book stores and used record stores are now long gone (or, thankfully, moved elsewhere in the case of Book Nook). Sometimes it makes me happy just to be there, since I have so many great memories of that time in my life, and of those book-buying trips with Scott. Sometimes it makes me sad that the area has changed so much, and sadder still that I can't be fifteen again, heading out with Scott to drive down Buford Highway.

My Anxieties Have Anxieties

I don't know how old I was when I first read Peanuts. I'm pretty sure it was sometime back in fourth grade, maybe even third, when I started my relationship with these books.

And for me, Peanuts was always about books. I'm sure that for years I was not even aware it was a daily comic strip, probably didn't even know what that meant—but I knew the books. "A Charlie Brown Christmas" was on TV for the first time two years before I was born and had become a seasonal staple by the time I was in fourth grade, but I don't remember seeing it when I was a kid, or seeing any of the other Peanuts TV specials that had been produced by the time I was in fourth grade—but I knew the books.

I've been collecting them, the books, for more than forty-five years. I don't actually have that many—forty-two: I just turned around and counted them—but they are precious to me.

Not everyone cared for Peanuts as much as I do, of course. Al Capp, creator of the "Li'l Abner" comic strip and a generation older than Peanuts creator Charles Schulz, once famously characterized the kids in Peanuts as "...mean little b*stards. Eager to hurt each other." Maybe Capp had a point, but he didn't seem to appreciate the fact that this made them all the more real as kids and as human beings, and that it made the moments of truth and beauty they revealed, either by transcending the inherent melancholy of life or by accepting it, all the more beautiful.

"Life is rarely one way, Charlie Brown," Linus says to his friend as the two lean against the brick wall where they do all their philosophizing, "You win a few, and you lose a few."

"Really?" says Charlie Brown, who—at least in his own perception—has never won a thing in his life, and—again, at least in his own perception—probably never will. "Gee," he says in the last panel, his mouth in the beginnings of a hopeful smile, "that'd be neat!!"

That hopeful smile makes Peanuts wonderful.

The Weekly Reader Book Club

Back in fourth grade I was a member of the Weekly Reader Book Club.

Man, it was the best getting books in the mail! And I read every one of them, always finishing one week's book before the next week's arrived. Over the course of the next couple of years I read them all again, getting through some of them three or four times while I was still in elementary school. (This was, of course, in addition to re-reading Harriet The Spy and The Witch of Blackbird Pond every couple of months, and reading other books from the school library as well, like The Ghost Belonged to Me and Tuck Everlasting. I was constantly reading back then. It's a wonder I managed to fit in any of my actual school work!) I still have all of those Weekly Reader Book Club editions, on a bookshelf in my bedroom.

But it's not that many, really: only seven--all of the ones I own are shown in the photograph--so if it really was "weekly," then I wasn't even in it for two full months. I'm not sure why it was such a short time; maybe it was even my choice. Maybe I begged my parents to let me divert the money towards the ever-growing Micronauts and Shogun Warriors collection my brother and I were intent on amassing. (Hmmm...Micronauts vs. books? That's a hard call. Today, I'd probably pick books--probably--but I'm not so sure about 1978 Chris.) It was a long time ago, and I don't remember. I know that the Weekly Reader Book Club started many years before they ever sent me a book, and I also know it doesn't exist any more. But then, neither do Micronauts or Shogun Warriors.

And by the way, Harriet the Spy (by Louise Fitzhugh), The Witch of Blackbird Pond (by Elizabeth George Speare), The Ghost Belonged to Me (by Richard Peck), and Tuck Everlasting (by Natalie Babbitt) are still great books--I've re-read them all in the past few years, and they hold up well. If you haven't read them and you're interested in children's literature, I recommend them. You might enjoy them.

Alfred Hitchcock Mystery/Horror Anthologies

Last week I wrote about the Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators series, but there were some other books, released around the same time, that were also important to me, and which had a lot in common with the Three Investigators books. These also had Alfred Hitchcock's name on them and his likeness on the cover (and in some of the internal illustrations), though Hitchcock actually had nothing to do with them; many of them were edited by Robert Arthur, creator of the Three Investigators and author of the first nine books in the series; and they were published by Random House for the young reading audience.

Alfred Hitchcock's Ghostly Gallery and Alfred Hitchcock's Haunted Houseful (and several others, including Sinister Spies, Daring Detectives, and Monster Museum--all with Alfred Hitchcock's before the title proper) weren't novels, they were short story collections, and included stories by many of the greats of the mystery and horror fields, such as Arthur Conan Doyle, H.G. Wells, H.P. Lovecraft, Lord Dunsany, Algernon Blackwood, Theodore Sturgeon, Ray Bradbury, Manly Wade Wellman, and many others. As I've already said, many of them were edited by Robert Arthur ("The editor [presumably a reference to Hitchcock] gratefully acknowledges the invaluable assistance of Robert Arthur in the preparation of this volume" says Alfred Hitchcock's Ghostly Gallery at the beginning of the copyright section, though Alfred Hitchcock's Haunted Houseful acknowledges Muriel Fuller), and Arthur often included a story of his own in the Table of Contents--and his stories were very good; Random House also published an excellent collections of Arthur's stories(Mystery and More Mystery, which has no mention of Alfred Hitchcock on it, but is otherwise much like the above mentioned anthologies).

These are really great books, and I'm glad I had them when I was a kid--though, honestly, the cover (actually more the back cover than the front) of Alfred Hitchcock's Ghostly Gallery (which I got as a birthday or Christmas present when I was about eight; I got the whole book as a present, I mean, not just the cover) scared the bejeebers out of me when I was young. Many of the stories are great, but so are the illustrations.

The Three Investigators

These are the books that made me fall in love with reading and books, forty-five years ago.

When I say that, I mean that these are literally the books--these actual copies--that I started reading in 1975, thanks to my cousin Sharon (who, I am very sorry to say, is no longer here with us for me to thank for starting me off in this direction), and which I collected and read and re-read voraciously for several years, and which I've had as an important part of my personal library for nearly half a century.

The series--Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators--was created by Robert Arthur in 1964; he wrote the first nine books, and also the eleventh, and when he died in 1969, the series was continued by various other writers for almost two decades more, ultimately reaching forty-three volumes. (It's actually a little more complicated than that, but that's enough of an explanation for this post.) Alfred Hitchcock didn't really have anything to do with the series, he just allowed his name and likeness to be used in the books. The Hitchcock introductions to the books were in truth written by the books' authors, and when Hitchcock died in 1980, the series switched from the real (but no longer living) Hitchcock to the fictional mystery novelist Hector Sebastian. Gradually, all of the original series was revised and republished to feature Sebastian instead of Hitchcock.

The first sixteen books included great illustrations by Harry Kane; those illustrations are an important part of what made me love the books. I'm still disappointed that more novels don't feature illustrations every thirty or forty pages to show you what everything looks like. (Frankly, The Brothers Karamazov could do with a few. If it had some illustrations, maybe I could actually finish the darn thing. Or at least get past page 75. But I digress...)

I've re-read these books--especially the ones by Robert Arthur--a number of times over the years. They hold up pretty well. Nothing's as mind-blowing as being an eight-year-old and discovering them for the first time, but they're still pretty fun.

On Grits and Grannies

Every morning I wake Elyse up at 6:55 and say, "It's time to get up, Honey." She mumbles and turns over to face the wall, and I ask, "Do you want me to make you some grits?" She says "Uh-huh" into her pillow, and I ask, "Do you want to stay in bed until they're ready?" Of course she says yes.

So I shuffle off to the kitchen to make her some grits.

I'm quite happy using instant grits, Quaker Instant Grits with Butter Flavor, to be exact. I do wonder how a grits purist would feel—and I'm pretty confident there are grits purists; I'm sure a quick Google search would return many very opinionated grits Web sites—when I recall that scene in My Cousin Vinny when the witness on the stand asserts that "no self-respecting Southerner uses instant grits." Well, maybe I'm not a self-respecting Southerner. In many ways I'm only southern at all by an accident of geography: I love but can't personally relate to the works of true Southern writers like Flannery O'Connor and William Faulkner and Eudora Welty. In fact, if I were able to go back in time and have a conversation with any of them, it's possible I wouldn't even be able to understand them through their thick Southern accents.

But about those grits....

When I was little, starting (I believe) when I was five years old and my family was freshly returned from our brief life in Maryland, and lasting at least until I was eight—this I can say for sure, and I'll tell you why in a minute—I would often be left for a morning or a day with my grandmother at her little brick house in Tucker. I suppose my mother needed the time to go to work at a part-time job, or run errands, or maybe do some shopping; I don't know that it ever occurred to me to wonder where Mom was going when she dropped me off at Granny's. In any case, I remember those times with Granny with a great fondness, as something I very much looked forward to. Whether that is exactly what I felt at the time I really can't be sure, but I can tell you that now I miss them terribly; I would give nearly anything to be a kid again on my way to Granny's, where we would read stories, color in coloring books, and, when I got a bit older, sit and watch "Wheel of Fortune" with its original host, Chuck Woolery, on that small rabbit-ear-antennaed color TV that sat on the rolling cart in her living room. (And that is how I know that these times with Granny went on at least until I was eight: in 1974, when I was seven, we couldn't have watched "Wheel of Fortune," for it didn't begin its lengthy run until a year later.)

One of the details I've been remembering the most lately, the thing that makes me wistful as I prepare my breakfast these days, is seeing Granny make grits for me on those mornings more than four decades ago. I was much more interested in eating than in cooking, so I didn't pay close attention to what she did, but I know it involved bowls and pots and measuring cups and water from the tap and grits from a bag she kept under the counter—she probably used quick grits, for I don't think instant grits existed yet, and even if they did, I want to believe that my grandmother wouldn't give in to them, as I have. Finally, when the fixings were all prepared, she would ask me, "Soupy or not?" Some days I would want them soupy: plenty of water for very thin, easily slurped grits. Some days, not: only the proscribed amount of water, or perhaps even a bit less, for thicker, more substantial grits.

So when I fix a bowl of grits for Elyse every morning, I am temporarily taken back to the early seventies, to that small kitchen in that little brick house in the suburbs of Atlanta. It's one way to keep my grandmother alive and with me, and to keep alive within me the memories of people and places who were once so important to me. And in a very real way, it keeps me alive within me; the me that once was, many years ago, and in most important ways is still here. Someday when this story will mean something to Jessica and Elyse, I hope a little of my grandmother—their great-grandmother—may live within them too, and perhaps a bit more of their father than is already there. Someday I hope it will resonate with Elyse if I ask her if she wants her grits soupy or not. (If I asked her that question now, I'm pretty sure she would just wrinkle her nose and say, "Make them like you always make them." Which, by the way, is a little bit soupy; I use five ounces of water for one bowl rather than the four ounces the directions on the box call for.)

The thing about getting older, if you're me, anyway, is that you can look back and see how wonderful, how nearly perfect, many of the pieces of your past have been. But you also realize that you slogged through these near-perfect times largely blind to how truly wonderful they were. Back then, I took it all for granted, as children—as we all—are wont to do. I was clueless. I still am.

I'm not the first person to say this—it is, in fact, something of a cliché—but it helps you understand the importance of appreciating every moment, of realizing how lucky you really are, of trying your hardest to take nothing for granted. The importance of really taking the time to enjoy a good bowl of grits. It's such a simple thing, and yet, as you can see, it's really not.

I'm glad I get to prepare grits for my daughter for breakfast. I'm sorry I didn't realize what a precious thing it was, all those years ago, to have a granny who would make them for me, just the way I wanted them—soupy, or not.

(NB: I started this several months ago—actually, in a different form, several years ago—but am just now getting around the finishing and publishing it. Everything I've written here is still true, except that lately Elyse hasn't been eating grits as often; now she's more given to requesting Pop Tarts or Honeynut Cheerios. Maybe I'll write an essay about my lengthy history with Pop Tarts and breakfast cereals some day.)

STAR WARS and "Star Trek" and Jessica and Me

For the last couple of days, Anna and Elyse have been camping at Stone Mountain. While they were gone, Jessica and I watched Star Wars (the real Star Wars, the one that came out in 1977 and blew me away when I saw it at the age of ten, which needs no colon and subtitle or episode number) and four episodes of "Star Trek" (the real "Star Trek," the show that came on the air before I was even born and which I really loved when I was in fifth grade, not long after I first saw Star Wars).

It was quite a triumph to get Jessica to watch them with me. She's been resisting Star Wars for years, though I knew, and assured her, that she would be captivated by it. She liked "Star Trek, " too, though the first episode, "The Man Trap," has that scary salt vampire creature that kind of freaked her out. I warned her, but she wanted to start at the beginning, so we did, scary salt vampire monster or not. That was last night; we watched three more episodes this morning. None of them had scary monsters, but the creepy kid in "Charlie X" has a pretty scary look sometimes.

I had forgotten just how much I was into "Star Trek" back when I was Jessica's age (or actually about a year younger). I had a worn copy of The Star Fleet Technical Manual, which I think I got—possibly stole—from someone at school, and which I used to pore over for hours at a time. I had a copy of David Gerrold's great The World of Star Trek, which I read in pieces (that is, not all at once, from front to back) over the course of a year or so, mostly concentrating on the episode guide which (if I remember correctly) was at the end, and the color pictures, which I believe were in the middle. I'd love to have that specific copy again; I do have the book, a trade-size paperback that came out in the mid-eighties, but the actual copy that I had in fifth grade, which was printed back when the original three-season series was all there was of "Star Trek," is lost to me; I think I loaned it to my friend Skipper and never got it back. I also had several copies of Alan Dean Foster's novelizations of the "Star Trek" cartoon series, but I don't think I actually ever read any of them.

I also started my own science fiction novel, which was a blatant rip-off of "Star Trek" except that I envisioned my ship's captain as looking like Lou Ferrigno, the body-builder actor who played the Incredible Hulk in the popular TV show of the time. Thankfully I never got past the first chapter of that novel.

I loved, and still love, not just the premise and story lines of "Star Trek," but the look of it: the Enterprise, the uniforms, all the reds and blues; the whistles and beeps of the ship's computer, the swish of the doors as they slid open; the style of the captain's chair, which I really wanted in our living room in Lilburn; the phasers and communicators and tricorders; every inside set that looked convincingly like a real starship bridge or sick bay or transporter room, but also like a TV studio set; every outdoor set that looked a little bit like a planet a landing party might be beamed down to, a lot like the planet the landing party was beamed down to last week, and even more like a studio set with props painted to look like boulders and sky and alien ruins.

I hope Jessica wants to watch some more "Star Trek." I do love it.

Nostalgia and T.V. and Me and Jessica

Not everyone is affected by middle age the same way, so I don't know if this is a common experience or not, but one of the things middle age has done to me is to make me pine for things that weren't all that good the first time around.

Earlier tonight I was searching for one thing on the Internet, and, as happens so often and so easily, I got distracted by any number of other things. In the process, I came across a mention on some random guy's blog of the great -- er, "great" may be a bit generous; let's say the factually once existing Vic Tayback. Many years ago, Tayback played the cook and owner of Mel's Diner in the great -- er, again, too generous; in the late-1970's sitcom "Alice."

And, seeing that, I was overcome with a wistful longing to see "Alice" again.

It wasn't that great a show, really; definitely not one that I made sure to always see when it was on back then, and not one that I watched regularly in syndication on Nick at Nite or TV Land; in fact, I probably haven't seen "Alice" in close to forty years. But I did enjoy it when I saw it, which was at least somewhat regularly between 1978 and 1980 or so. If you were around back then, you probably remember the show's breakout star, Polly Holliday, who played waitress Flo on the series, famous for her exasperated cry of "Kiss my grits!" when Mel would get on her last nerve. You may also remember, if your head is as full of as much ancient pop-culture trivia as mine is, that Dave Madden played one of the regular customers at the diner; Madden is perhaps most famous as manager (and Danny's foil) Reuben Kincaid on "The Partridge Family" -- another show I would love to see again, despite its mediocrity.

But what I really want, of course, is not so much to see "Alice" or "The Partridge Family" again -- I feel a similar nostalgia for "The Brady Bunch," and have it in my Hulu watchlist, but I've only actually watched one episode -- as it is to be eight or ten or twelve again, in my childhood home in Lilburn, in the living room (or the den; for a time we had a TV set there, and for some reason I remember watching "Alice" there more than in the living room) with my family, watching...well, whatever happened to be on would do, actually. To be young again, my whole life before me, my parents a full decade and a half younger than I am as I type this, my only real responsibility getting through sixth grade with grades good enough to get me promoted to seventh, my grandmother still alive, my extended family still close enough that I see my cousins every couple of weeks and my cousin Scott, then my best friend, at least once a week, my vague dream of someday being a novelist not yet fully formed, and certainly not dead, as it sometimes feels now.

Without meaning to, I have infected Jessica with a similar nostalgia, though in her case I guess it can't truly be called "nostalgia," since she was not with me forty or more years ago when I originally watched the TV shows she now watches on DVD or streaming from Hulu or Boomerang: "Gilligan's Island," "The Monkees," "The Flintstones," "The Munsters," "The Addams Family"; none of them great shows (though it pains me to admit that "Gilligan's Island" and "The Monkees" are not exceptional TV shows, for I do love them so), but all of them fun and funny and entertaining and basically harmless. I do feel a little guilty sometimes that, in encouraging her fondness for these shows, I am giving her attachments that are totally foreign to just about everyone else her age: when Peter Tork passed away recently at the age of 77, I saw several remembrances of him and the Monkees from my peers on social media, but I'm pretty sure none of Jessica's peers had any idea who Peter Tork was, or that he had even existed.

I don't know if the longing for mediocre elements from your past (even for things you didn't like; sometimes I listen with great enjoyment to songs that I hated when they were first out) is common or not, but I am pretty sure it's a common desire to want to recreate some of your own youth for your children. Jessica, if you read this years from now, perhaps even when you are near my current age, I'm sorry I've done this to you, but I'm really, really glad you like "The Monkees."