Apple Trees

Since I’m busy packing and preparing for our move, I decided not to inflict my stress on you all.  Instead, I’ve arranged for guest posts all week.  Lucky you.  This is quality stuff indeed.

Today’s post is by my younger brother Michael, who is married and also the father of the child known on this blog as the Boy.  Michael doesn’t have a blog, which is a shame, because he is intelligent and funny and would always have interesting things to say.  When not blogging here and raising the Boy, Michael is a high school English teacher who has taken a sabbatical from teaching to get a master’s degree.  When he has a spare moment or two, he also works part-time at a bookstore.

It’s hard to reconcile all that grown-up-ness with my memories of when I was ten and Michael was a newborn.  As far as  I was concerned, he was the Greatest Toy Ever.

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In the free time I don’t have, I work at a large bookstore that you’re probably familiar with. It is not my main job; in fact, depending on how you count it up, it is my fourth job. Oddly enough, despite the fact that I have, in my life, had full-time salaried employment from several major companies, my bookselling job is by far the most competitive position for which I have ever been hired. (The branch at which I work, for instance, receives more than 200 applications a month for what amounts to zero open positions.)

From the outside, the position of bookseller always seemed to me rather posh and academic. The snobbish derision with which this company’s booksellers looked down upon me with always made me feel like I was some Dickensian orphan sent to the headmaster for my impish roguery. However, upon employment, I have realized such an attitude occurs when you pay someone with a Ph.D or an M.F.A.  slightly above minimum wage. I misdiagnosed their detached disappointment as aloofness. I have further realized that the life of the bookseller is really not all that glamorous at all.

An example: The men’s bathroom at my bookstore has a sign on it that reads, “Door must remain open at all times.” At orientation we were told that if someone complains, we are to tell them that the door must stay open because the second stall from the left often overflows and the female managers need to be able to see this. The real reason though is, as my manager told us, that several “enterprising young men had set up business in the bathroom.” When I heard this, I strained to think what this might mean. Heroin trade? Cock-fighting? Black market internal organs? The answer it turns out is the rather mundane gay rendezvous point. I will note for the record that our “open-door policy” has prevented all but one known incident, which involved the discovery (thankfully not by me) of three men enthusiastically perusing not only a magazine but also each other.

Working at a bookstore leads you some down some odd paths. I never thought for instance that I would have to argue with a parent on why it’s not a good idea to leave their 2-year-old unattended in the children’s department. I never thought for instance that I would be hired to slowly antagonize someone by asking them increasingly obnoxious questions like “Do you have a membership” followed by “Do you want a membership” followed by “Do you want to give us your email address” followed by “Do you need a gift card.” If you’ve never seen a 30-something bachelor grow increasingly incensed because he just wants to buy his copy of High Times in a timely and dignified manner, then you’ve missed out on something. The mutual degradation that occurs in such a moment is palpable.
Sometimes life at a bookstore is depressing. The homeless man who smells so bad it lingers for minutes afterwards. The mom who refuses to listen to her sick child and who continues shopping after he’s thrown up on the floor. The lonely old man who clearly has nowhere else to be. The upper class woman who seems to be addicted to returning things, even minutes after they’re purchased.

Most often, though, working at a bookstore is an infuriating and demoralizing process. The best example of this would be when I am in charge of newsstand. I did not really have an anger management problem before I worked in retail, but being in charge of newsstand often threatens my belief in the decency of mankind. In the newsstand at the store I work at, there are approximately 10,000 magazines. On a busy day, around 1,000 of these will be pulled out, leafed through, and left on top of the café trash cans, on the tables, in the chairs, on the benches, in the bathroom, and in the children’s section. Others will be intentionally placed back in the wrong sections. My job on these days is to fix these problems and on the bad days it makes me incredibly angry. Maybe not Bruce Banner angry, but pretty angry. My strategy for coping with this is to funnel my anger in the direction of their interests. For instance, if I find a stack of home décor magazines, I root for termites to infest their immaculate home. If I find car magazines, I root for vapor lock. Sometimes this can be physical, like when I root for their Rachel Ray-inspired soufflé to collapse. Sometimes this can be philosophical, like when I root for their interest in alternative religions to lead to some crippling metaphysical doubt. I can’t say I’m proud of this outlook, but it gets me through the day.

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All of this leads me, oddly enough, to a tree. In the local children’s museum, there is this apple tree. The tree has branches and leaves and apples, but it isn’t real. It is an exhibit, made of fiberglass and plastic. Children gather the apples and drop them into a machine inside the tree. The machine lifts them up a tube and then drops them into a chamber. A slowly spinning propeller sends each apple down a different tube where children may then re-gather them. And repeat.
Recently, I sat near this tree and pondered its existence. Unlike most of the exhibits, its purpose is not entirely clear. If a child plays in the dinosaur dig, they work on motor skills and learn about fossils. If a child walks through the ambulance on display, they can see a toned-down version of what happens there.
But this tree. It doesn’t teach them about apples. It doesn’t teach them about trees. It teaches a little about machinery, but I’ve seen much better exhibits that accomplish this. Maybe it’s just meant to be fun.

After watching for a moment, though, I realized what I took from it: futility. A child sees a tree and gathering apples. I see a stack of magazines that will be have to be replaced or a new shipment of books that will soon be sold and need replacement. I see a store that needs to be straightened, so that it can be destroyed again the next day. Unfortunately, in this tree, I see adulthood.

Now, when I go to the children’s museum, my young son spots the tree and there’s nothing more he wants than to get an apple and send it up the chute. The children around him are happy, filled with joy in the promise of mechanized repetition. I wish I could share their joy, but I know better.