Books/Reading

So, this week is my last week of work (I’m leaving to go to grad school), and I’m spending it training the girl that’s going to take over my position.

My job is awesome. I will never have another job like it as long as I live. Not only are my hours guaranteed (9 am to 3 pm, natch), and I love all the people, but for the most part I get paid to do what I would do during my day anyway.

See, I’m a bake shop girl. It’s this tiny little shop attached to a restaurant and I sell takeaway sandwiches and soups and salads along with delicious little cookies and muffins and scones and croissants. My boss is very laid-back and lets me write quotes and interesting facts and words of the day on the board and altogether doesn’t really bother me. So my entire personality has oozed its way into that little shop. It’s my shop, in a way. I know my regulars; we ask each other about our weekends, our days, what we’re reading, the events of the town. I’ve recommended oodles of books and recipes and movies and music for people (and their children). But this usually only occupies about 2 hours of my day, doling out soup and sandwiches to the wonderful (and sometimes eccentric) townspeople that come in and conversating about my Oscar Wilde/Theodore Roosevelt/Winston Churchill/Anais Nin quote.

The rest of my day is spent reading. Gloriously, gloriously reading. This winter/spring/summer I’ve devoured Patti Smith, The Hunger Games trilogy, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Deborah Harkness, Donna Tartt, A.S. Byatt, E.E. Cummings …  it’s been so wonderful to sit and read, to have the time to sit and read whatever I like.

The last few months have been occupied by my preliminary reading list for my school program. After walking the new girl through my day yesterday, today I took a step back; curled up in the back entrance stairs I kept an eye on her over my book and annotations.

When the pastry chef came up with a tray of oatmeal raisin cookies and saw me perched on the stairs, he chuckled to himself before depositing the tray in the anteroom.

“Nice job,” he said to me, then took a pause “not that this is anything different from what you usually do during the day.”

I grimaced at him, fanning through the 200 plus pages I had yet to reading in what was arguably the most significant book on my reading list.

“Yeah, but I still have to read allllllllll of this.”

My usually sarcastic and slightly curmudgeonly boss smiled at me.

“But you like to read. You love to read! It’s your passion! And you get to do it for the rest of your life! … . actually, do you need more light?”

“No,” I said, squinting up at him in the dim light, “this’ll do just fine.”

I love my job. I love the people I work with. As excited as I am to move on to what will surely be great things, I will deeply miss this little community I feel I’ve grown to be a part of.