Another gem from Frenchys

 Last Sunday after church my wife suggested we go to the farmers market in Shelburne. I wasn't sure there was a farmers market on Sunday afternoon but a check online confirmed that indeed there was, so we went.

After picking up some blueberries, carrots, and beets, we walked back to the Bean Dock for lunch, for me a scallop and bacon wrap. Then, rather than having our usual ice cream desert, we headed for the Shelburne Frenchys.

I was looking for a couple of long sleeve shirts and I found two which I liked. Then I came across a cotton sweater which caught my eye and I added that to my "shopping cart." This, I was thinking, was enough. I hadn't seen a book bin and assumed that there wasn't one. In the past the book bin at the Shelburne Frenchys had always been in the front of the store.

Heading for the restroom -- the "washroom" as they called it, I spotted two things that were different this year. The door to the washroom was unlocked, you didn't have to ask the cashier for the key suspended from a stick too big to put in your pocket, and, in the back of the store near the washroom, was a book bin. Of course I stopped to look.

It being a bit past mid-summer, the bin was nearly empty but, sorting through it, I found two books I decided to buy. One was Tom Clancy's "The Hunt For Red October." The other was a slightly battered but probably unread book by someone with a really weird name. The back cover reported some prize nominations for the author so I thought it could be interesting. I left Frenchys that day with my two shirts, one cotton sweater, two books, and my wife.

I had picked the Clancy book with the idea that breezing through it could give me some relief from the intensity of the books I had just finished. Unfortunately, when I started in on it, I found that the type, in this small, thick, paperback edition was a struggle for my eyes. I turned to the other book by the writer with the weird name.

At first I thought "Yaa Gyasi" was on of those made up names that creative people adopt to conceal their real backgrounds -- like "Elizabeth Arden" who started out in life as Florence Nightingale Graham. But, it turned out, Yaa Gyasi was real, and her writing inspired. "Transcendent Kingdom" was the book I had acquired. Thank you, Frenchys. The book is a gem.

Gyasi's writing is so good it humbled me. Could I ever write as well? But it also was a challenge, to do better with my next project, to work harder, to try to live up to a standard I'd discovered at Frenchys.

It's an amazing world out there.

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