Last week Friday during my day off work and day on running errands, I found myself in a familiar haunt: my old neighborhood bookstore. It’s one of my happy places, where I can spend hours pouring over shelves of disjointed genres, entertaining and tickling different parts of my thoughts/memories/imagination that have been neglected.

Drifting up and down the aisles pressed against the wall of the store allocated for books on spirituality and religion, I passed a young man engrossed in a book. Slouched down in his temporary sanctuary of a chair that struggles not to be too inviting.

I made mental notes about him, many of which have long since been crumpled up and thrown away. There’s still a faint scribble about his body language blasting an all points bulletin that he was both smart enough to chill there and probably too cool to be there.

He seemed to be positioning the book he was reading in such a way that no one would see.

It was “Making it on Broadway”, and wonder if he’ll try.

I hope he does, but with those mental notes now in a landfill or on a barge off the Jersey shore or the trash vortex, I don’t suppose I’ll ever know.