The first day at my new part-time job was wonderful, meaningful and personal in ways I had not expected. There were calls from all over the country – Oklahoma, Minnesota, California – and it just seemed to click.  I was able to recommend books that people wanted on the spot, and I felt strong and clear about the choices. I sold a lot of books. I came prepared, with a long list of books in different categories – some I had read, some I read about. I found it natural to match people up, to help the cut through the clutter. I will be hearing from many of those people regularly, I am sure. I am good at this, I think, it is a useful and fun thing to do. You have to be confident and trust your instincts.

I asked people their interests, preferences (paperback/hardcover, etc., budgets). Some people wanted my recommendations, other gave me some details about the kinds of books they loved and that was helpful in my suggesting some books. I had ideas for them, directions, writers they might not be aware of.  I felt a strong connection with the people calling. People bought novels, mysteries, non-fiction books and memoirs.

Some people also came into the store to talk to me in person, and we had the place humming for a quiet January afternoon. Wait till we really get rolling. I spent a few minutes looking at the inventory, trying to catch up with what is there but there wasn’t much spare time.

There was another high point for me, a wonderful sub-text.  I hadn’t told Connie this, but my inspiration for working the floor of Battenkill books as Recommender-In-Chief was a man named Bob Gray, a  writer, ferocious individualist and passionate reader I met when I first moved to the country more than a decade ago. Soon after I moved upstate,  I called the Northshire Bookstore in Manchester, Vt., one of the best independent bookstores in America, and I asked the bookseller who answered if he had any books on Thomas Merton. I was thinking of writing about him, I said.

I called the right person. The bookseller was interested in spirituality, was a lapsed Catholic and a great lover of books. We talked a long time on the phone. He knew a lot about Merton and we talked for a long time and Bob helped me choose some books by Merton and I came and picked them up and we became good friends. Researching Merton’s life, I talked to Bob Gray often. These books and conversations sparked the idea for “Running To The Mountain,” my first book written upstate, the book that started it all. Without Bob Gray, that would have been a very different book.

Whenever I needed a book after that, and that was often that lonely year alone on the mountaintop, I called the bookstore or came to see Bob, wander through the bookstore, leaf through his recommendations –   he was always able to recommend a book I liked. I would drive to Vermont to meet him, pick up the book, have some coffee. I spent that winter on the mountain alone, and Bob Gray became increasingly important to me. He always embodied the best of the bookstore idea.

Talking to Bob drew me into the world of books at an important time for me and he was always the template for what I wanted to find in a bookstore: an intelligent helpful person who would give me some ideas and leave me to make my decisions. The problem was I rarely met anyone like Bob, at any bookstore, there or anywhere else. In the idiosyncratic way of foolish men, we saw one another socially from time to time, but drifted apart, rather than closer together, as we wrestled with life’s choices and our own creative pursuits. I knew that Bob was a pioneer in understanding the importance of blogs and social media and also in grasping how bookstores need to change to survive.

Like me, he ranted and raved about the importance of understanding new technologies but found resistance to change almost everywhere. As he pointed out today, the reason we haven’t stayed more in touch is that we are too much alike. True. Bob has triumphed. He now writes an influential column about books and publishing for the online publishing magazine ShelfAwareness and works out of Saratoga Springs, N.Y. There is no longer much resistance to his prescient ideas.

When Bob heard of my new job working the floor at Battenkill Books, he contacted Connie Brooks and told he wanted to come to the store today to write about my new job for his publication, and about this convergence of booksellers.

So there we were, sitting in the bookstore, catching up, trading perspectives. How foolish, I kept thinking, to let a friendship like this lapse. Bob embodies the best of what bookstores were, and what many are working to become again. I saw today firsthand that people need to talk to someone who can help them learn of books they want to read. They want it and need it. They are willing to pay for it and support it.

In the Corporate Nation, people want their bookstores to survive. They are fighting for them. The least writers can do is join the fray.   Independent bookstores are making a comeback, as a new, tough and hard-working generation of bookstore people – Connie Brooks comes to mind – are succeeding where so many others could not. As I told Bob Gray, it is time for writers to do more than harrumph about e-books and  the unhealthy power of online oligarchies. Time to get active. He was way ahead of me.

I was very privileged to have Bob Gray come and buy two books from me – I recommended John Banville and Jonathan Tropper’s new novels to him, and he bought both of them – and I was very touched by  the two of us sitting in this bookstore completing this powerful circle. His presence gave the afternoon so much meaning, as did the many people who called. I enjoyed talking with Vicki out in her iced-in town. She lost her husband last year, her parents suffer from Alzheimer’s. I recommended four books to her, and everyone clicked for her, touched interests and nerves. I recommended a book about farm life in Kansas. She was born in Kansas. I recommended a mystery set in Minnesota, that’s where she lives. I suggested a novel about art theft and her husband, it turned out, was an art historian.  Kismet. A great feeling for me. She and I will talk again, just as Jon Katz and Bob Gray did at the Northshire. We became connected in a particularly intimate way.

The part-time job is good for me as well as the bookstore, selfish as well as selfless. When you write about animals and dogs and rural life, you are more apt to be asked about dog poop and housebreaking about writing. I am always – always – telling people that a writer is not the same as a dog trainer, even if he writes about dogs.  Working in the bookstore, I felt nourished, the words and books reinforcing who I am and what a writer is.

I would wish nothing more for bookstores than that each one found a Bob Gray and let him or her loose on a bookstore floor to cross book lovers to safety amidst all of the choices and decisions they are asked to make. If I can bring a slice of that back to my great local bookstore, I cannot imagine time better spent. I love my new job. My wonderful wife even brought me soup and some bread.