It may have come up in my recent writing that my daughter has been participating in a theatre camp near the town where I grew up. As it’s a day camp and I live an hour away, with work requiring that I be on-site at particular times, I cannot drive here there and back as was the case in some years past; consequently, my daughter is staying with her grandparents, who still live in the house they lived in when I graduated high school a couple of dozen years back. One result of that is that I have been going back where I came from–more or less; there are some caveats to consider–and have had occasion to spend a bit of time out in the town.

Part of that time came at the end of last week. My daughter gave her weekly performance with the camp, and my wife and I–joined by my brother and his son–took her to lunch afterwards. Where we went to lunch was in the same shopping center as the first bookstore that I remember going to, and one I’ve noted once or twice before: Books to Share in Kerrville. I’m almost always happy to stop by a bookstore, generally, and I knew (and confirmed) that I had access to a substantial account at Books to Share, so we walked across the asphalt pond of the shopping center parking lot, putting in at the island of peace that the bookstore is.

Walking in, my family and I were greeted warmly, if not with full recognition; we were clearly familiar, but it had been a while since we’d been by (my wife, my daughter, and I). And I was taken back to my early childhood, released from my grandmother’s hand to nearly run among the towering stacks piled with books that had been brought in by other readers and left in exchange for discounts on others yet, a forest ecosystem I did not yet perceive as a living thing but from which I drank deeply of joy. I was taken back to being around my daughter’s age–she’s ten as I write this–beginning to venture out in earnest from the “children’s” section into “grown-up” books, of which I still have some copies on shelves that have been filled and emptied and moved across states and time zones more often than I’d prefer. I was taken back to my teenage years, when my tastes solidified (and from which they still have not thawed, in large part, even if they have grown to include more), and the stacks I would take in and out of the store swelled larger and larger.

I was taken back, too, to my college years, when my visits were fewer but more focused, my English-major self having a reading list a yard long and deeper yet, and I knew that I could find copies of the classic novels and poetry collections I needed to read and be able to write about for far less than the campus bookstore or the nascent online ordering platforms that pervade so much discourse now offer. I was taken back to my years in graduate school, when the visits were fewer yet but grown more poignant, when I could see that books I had had had continued to circulate even as people I had known since before I was in school no longer did. And I remembered the years since coming back to the Texas Hill Country, head bowed in defeat and showing my face as seldom as I could in the places I had been, thinking that they would know my shame and mock me for it as I felt I deserved to be mocked and ridiculed, even though they never did, greeting me each time with open smiles and kind words.

There’s some lesson to be taken from that, I’m sure. I’m not sure I’m a good enough student anymore–if ever I was–to learn it well.

I am sure, however, that it was good to go back, not least because my daughter fairly skipped among the stacks, face lighting with glee at getting to get books for herself to read and, afterward, to share.

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