It’s about a twenty or thirty minutes walk from our house to downtown Burlingame. Instead of going into the city tonight, I decided to walk over to Burlingame. I walked past the stores with expensive women’s clothing, past the Apple store, past Pottery Barn and Banana Republic, finding with unerring instinct the local independent bookstore.<\/p>\n
I wandered down to the current events section, which was right next to the children’s section. Near me, a man was standing next to a boy who was about 8 years old.<\/p>\n
“Dad, look at this book,” said the boy.<\/p>\n
The man mumbled a reply. He was looking at something else.<\/p>\n
“But Dad,” said the boy with more urgency in his voice, “look at this book.”<\/p>\n
“What?” said the man.<\/p>\n
“This book,” said the boy, showing it to his father. “It has Legos with the book.” His voice sounded slightly awestruck: a book with Legos!<\/p>\n
“Cool,” said the father, with some enthusiasm, which he spoiled by immediately turning to call to his wife across the store, “Did you see the children’s section? They have a good children’s section here.”<\/p>\n
I wandered over to the mystery books. There were two other children behind me looking at books. A man, presumably their father, walked over, and said, “OK, it’s time for the —— family to go now.” There was just the slightest hint of uncertainty in his voice.<\/p>\n
The children ignored him.<\/p>\n
“C’mon, guys, let’s please put the books back now,” said the tentative father.<\/p>\n
The children ignored him.<\/p>\n
“Don’t you guys want to get ice cream?” he said.<\/p>\n
“Ice cream?” they cried.<\/p>\n
“Yeah!” he said, putting their books back on the shelf for them.<\/p>\n
I suddenly noticed that there was one other solo adult in the bookstore; everyone else appeared to be part of a family of adults and children. I went over to the science fiction books, which again was near the big children’s section. Yet another parent was standing in the children’s section talking to a child.<\/p>\n
“Put the book back,” said the parent.<\/p>\n
“WAAH!” screamed the child.<\/p>\n
“OK, we’ll buy the book,” said the parent to stop the child from crying. This reminded me of when I visited a toy shop in a well-to-do white suburb for ten years, where someone I know was the manager. Behind the cash register, the staff had posted a sign that read, “Unattended children will be sold into slavery.”<\/p>\n
Unusually for me, I didn’t buy anything at this bookstore.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It’s about a twenty or thirty minutes walk from our house to downtown Burlingame. Instead of going into the city tonight, I decided to walk over to Burlingame. I walked past the stores with expensive women’s clothing, past the Apple store, past Pottery Barn and Banana Republic, finding with unerring instinct the local independent bookstore. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[411,46],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4961","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bay-area","category-book-culture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4961","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4961"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4961\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4966,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4961\/revisions\/4966"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4961"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4961"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4961"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}