best and worst

I had an absolutely vile customer today. I spent about ten minutes on a telephone searching for a title-less, author-less book about Coco Chanel for someone who told me that I was horrible, rude, unwilling, and a waste of time. This upset me, entirely too much, because I try my best to not be any of those things when at work (well, I try not to be any of those things in general, but especially at work where I think the whole point of working in a bookstore is how nice it is to be around people who are--mostly-- buying books because they genuinely want to).

I also had an absolutely delightful customer, an elderly man who told me about the time he spent two hours in a bar with Ernest Hemingway. He said that they talked about fishing, hunting, flying, and Cuba. He also said the Hemingway was "not as articulate as you would think," but that he was also extremely wonderful, and that he drank a lot.

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I've got a new idea in my head. It's something to do with the time my grandpa told me about sailing by the Rock of Gibraltar, about walking across Scotland, and about how horribly the gutters of Morocco smelled. You know, I have a photograph of my grandpa from when he was young, and he looks unexpectedly dashing: handsome and smiling and sepia toned in a slim and fashionable suit. He looks like a character out of one of those witty 1930s movies. It boggles my mind in the most wonderful way.