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“Life without community has produced, for many, a life style consisting mainly of a home-to-work-and-back-again shuttle. Social well-being and psychological health depend upon community”. – Ray Oldenburg

This week marks the release of the iPhone, and I note this as someone who used an Apple in graduate school, sorta (that means I means I paid someone else to type my thesis on an Apple IIe with one 400k floppy drive). My first computer was a 1984 Mac II with an Imagewriter. Best monochrome monitor anybody ever made. I still have all that kit, along with a few semi-defunct first generation iMacs. I reluctantly joined the PC/Windows world a few years back and still have trouble finding my data much of the time. Sigh.

I write this to acknowledge the iPhone because I’m waitin’ on a friend, she is overdue, and she does get lost, dear thing. But she has some sort of cell phone with an out-of-state area code (nobody seems to have been in Florida long enough to have new cell phone contracts), so I’m not gonna worry about her. If she printed the directions I sent her through our MySpace accounts, she’ll arrive in good stead.

She remarked some days ago that the MySpace birthday notifications prompt behavior a bit like leaving one’s Calling Card in the days when Ladies had Calling Hours. It revives a social nicety that so many of us lack in this, our society of isolation, and I grudgingly agreed. I do leave cute little pictures or notes for virtual strangers, wishing them Happy Mother’s or Father’s Day. It makes me feel good to leave them, and good to get them. It’s a weird cyber-popularity contest. More on that another time. Maybe.

And this brings me back to my original point.

I’m not sure we’re better connected these days, for all of our technology. I aver that the best social contact I had was in 1982 when I was a student in England. I was thousands of miles away from family, but right at home. I had no computer, no cell or any other phone, no Internet, and for a good six months, no television.

Now don’t feel sorry for me or be appalled! What I did have was a library full of newspapers (not the least of which was The International Herald Tribune), a Student’s Union with pub and coffee shop, and the Royal Mail. Twice a day! Early post came by 6am and late post, if I was lucky enough to get some (late post was often parcels!), arrived by 3pm. But only five days a week. I lived two stories up and on the back of the building, but when I heard that brass mail slot clink before dawn, I’d hare right down and get the mail, leaving it for the various other recipients as I passed their doors. Post was better than the newspaper that we thumbed every day. We’d get our current events, world, local and gossip at the Student’s Union, but the Post, that was just different. A letter sent from one end of England, or one end of a village would always always ALWAYS be delivered the following day. One made appointments and assignations that way. It WAS possible to make lunch date for Wednesday via Monday’s post. Mail from the States came within a week most of the time. When we needed to make the rare phone call, there were domestic and international call boxes.

The most important tool we had was actual human-on-human interaction! Our easiest and most reliable form of contact with our friends was to show up, just show up. In a day when not many people locked their doors, the barriers were few, and the obstacle of a few blocks’ walk was never daunting. And if we found nobody at the destination, we all had the good sense to have a pen and paper on hand to leave a note. A Calling Card as it were.

I’m glad I lived without before I got to choose from the myriad types of new communication. I’m glad because I got to experience what Urban Sociologist Ray Oldenburg called “Third Places” with first and second places being home and work. In his book, The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops. Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons, and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community, Oldenburg identifies, interprets, laments the decline, and encourages the revival of such community centers. In my childhood, we had them at Church or Synagogue, at Scouts, at Libraries, neighborhood markets and block parties (and in England, down the pub). We used to know our bank-tellers, our pharmacists, and the nice lady at the corner shop. Now we do our banking at ATMs, get our medications by mail, shop on-line or in mega-stores. We’ve taken to conveniences that make it possible for us to rush home, our first places, from our jobs, our second places, to check our email and catch whatever we put on our TiVo the previous day.

Have these time-saving strategies done more than just give us more time to isolate? Oh I could argue both sides of it. Since I’m working from home for now, I don’t even have a second place! So I joined my local library and go to our dog park a few times a week in search of good third places. But the flip-side? I met my husband on-line. I found my last business on-line. My house? You guessed it: found it on-line. Even Radar, our precious hound, was rescued from a virtual shelter.

Yeah, with the burgeoning use of texting, emailing, and social networking sites like Classmates, MySpace and FaceBook, we’ve all lost and found so much.

Ironic that I’m even discussing this on a BLOG on a book-selling website when I’d rather talk about it in person. I’m so glad my new friend is on her way over.

There are no lilacs here at the Adobe Book Cafe, but everything is coming up roses nonetheless. We find ourselves on the Gulf Coast of Florida thinking we’ve landed in clover. Ok, enough with the corny flower references or the boss will make me mow the lawn … not QUITE the same as pushing up daisies, but they don’t let me use the sharp things anymore. Except the old noggin’, noodle, uh, uh, no flower references for the old bean?

We got here in Autumn which really was having the last laugh, dodging both hurricane season here, and winter there, adoring the colorful trees down the eastern seaboard, and moving in on Halloween. We officially opened the Adobe Book Cafe to the public in January, and I’m just now catching my breath to tell you about the Cafe, and what we’ve got.

I wanted to let you know what I’ve been reading since I did finally get my obligatory “over 40″ spectacles and have rediscovered the joys of seeing again. As usual, there are a stack of several books on my bedside table, where I read, in varying degrees of priority and some partially read. I’m THAT kind of a reader: if I love what I’m reading, then there’s little that will stop me before I finish. I add that if I can, I save the last few chapters, the denoument of the book shall we say, until the morning. If I finish a book late in the night, I often reread the end the next morning.

There are the A-list books. In recent years, I include Jeffrey Archer (I renewed his acquaintance this year with Sons of Fortune, set in Connecticut, and False Impressions which includes a brief but chillingly real scene in the Twin Towers on 9/11), Lisa Scottoline, Randy Wayne White, (loved his South Florida fiction long before I moved here), J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter deserves several posts of his own this summer!), and Kellermans (related), Pattersons (not related) and Cornwell, Coulter, Roberts and Roberts as Robb.

A-list books are usually by a familiar author, but not of a series. If Nora Roberts has a full trilogy for me (and I try to wait until all three are available), she’s got my attention for three books straight. When I get that new Harry Potter in me mitts, ye won’t see me ’til I’ve done it. I admit, with pride, that I usually reread a series before a new one comes out (true not only of Harry Potter but also of Diana Gabaldon’s “Outlander” series, and Jane Auel’s entire “Earth’s Children” series). It’s like visiting with old friends.

The B-list books are the ones I’m gonna start next and the ones I’m reading in fits and starts. I’ve got at least one Nora Roberts single, an oldie called The Villas in train at the mo’. Beside it is Back Bay, by William Martin because I will get to the bottom of the mystery of the missing Paul Revere Silver Tea Set. I also enjoy teen fiction and am about to tuck into the first Alex Rider adventure, Stormbreaker by Anthony Horowitz. My bro’ reads these on purpose so they must be good. He’s coming up fast on 14 and is definitely in MY dip-set.

More about family and Florida another time. I just wanted to check in and let you know the Adobe Book Cafe is open, 24 hours a day!

Paris Hilton Rosie O’Donnell Mitt Romney J. K. Rowling Tom Clancy Dick Cheney Margaret Cho Tim Duncan Gordon Brown Hillary Rodham Clinton

Ok, that was an “insert searchable keywords here” moment. If I do that enough, I could develop quite a following. Think of it as something like Six Degrees of Tourette’s Syndrome, and ruminate on random connections among my selections. Or not!

With the release of the movie Nancy Drew, much has been said and written about Nancy’s place in our lives then and now. Many prominent women, including Senator Hillary Clinton, First Lady Laura Bush and Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg have all commented on how they spent many happy, empowering moments in her company as children. Other women have commented that Nancy has, in some ways, been marginalized in a society where women already know how to be clever and self-reliant. Some cringe at the modernization of Nancy, while others applaud the makeover.

I preface my comments by saying I haven’t seen the movie yet, but the trailer puts it on my must-see list! I’ve loved the modern versions of my childhood books, even the animated ones. James and the Giant Peach as well as two Willy Wonka movies. The Borrowers. Even the Eloise flicks have been charming. Favorite movies such as Freaky Friday and The Parent Trap (Lindsay Lohan connection noted, and she was fabulous in both roles). Yeah, I’m trying to confine my comments to books and bookselling, but the fact is, I’m a multi-media gal, one who bridges the generations of the manual typewriter and rotary phones with the internet and DVDs.

And this brings me back to my original point.

Would we consider Laura Ingalls Wilder less relevant or marginalized today because her life was lo-tech? Nah. Her books are still loved and read over and over by young readers (and the series is in constant and popular syndication). We still learn from her life on the frontier. Have I made ices from snow and maple syrup? Yup! Do the members of my family wonder why they get [Terry’s Chocolate] oranges in the toe of their Christmas stockings? Nope.

Agatha Christie is no less relevant today because Miss Marple didn‘t have a CSI forensic team. And while I read older mysteries knowing Patricia Corwell’s Kay Scarpetta would have employed the technology she could and solved the mystery thusly, it still would have taken her the same three hundred or so pages as it took Miss Marple, and I will have enjoyed both of them equally.

And so we now have our Valley Girl Nancy. I expect the movie will have a reverse spin-off and that the more than 150 Nancy Drew mysteries currently in print will fly off the shelves this summer. And they’ll be the paperback editions where Nancy has a blue mustang, or the hardbacks of my childhood where Nancy had a blue convertible, or the original issues where the family had a blue roadster. Yes, Nancy has evolved over the decades since she first appeared in print in 1930.

What would author Carolyn Keene have to say about today’s Nancy? We’ll never know! She will remain silent because she never existed! Yes, it’s true! Nancy Drew, The Hardy Boys, The Bobbsey Twins and numerous other beloved childhood series were products of the Stratemeyer Syndicate. Sounds ominous, a potential mystery plot of its own, eh? In some ways, yes …

Edward Stratemeyer was a writer himself, inspired largely by Horatio Alger’s rags-to-riches stories. He was, in fact, a pioneer in children’s fiction. He wrote and edited hundreds of children’s books under pseudonyms, and realizing the popularity of both series and mysteries, he merged the two for young readers. He often wrote plots summaries and had his ghostwriters flesh them out. The Syndicate was a secret society of fictional characters AND authors! And Nancy Drew was Stratemeyer’s last brain-child; the first issue was published days before he died, leaving his empire to his daughters. The Syndicate continued to produce Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys and many other books long after Edward’s death. In fact, the truth of authorship didn’t come out fully until Harriet Stratemeyer Edwards changed publishers in the early 1980’s. When she left Grosset and Dunlap for Simon and Schuster to get the Syndicate’s books into paperback, G & D filed suit claiming partial ownership. To protect image, one must surmise, Harriet claimed to be author. Ghost-writers were called to testify under oath and while the verdict was split, the truth was out there. The best part, in my humble opinion, is that Carolyn Keene is now as immortal as Nancy, and continued to “write” for decades after the demise of the Syndicate.

Yup, we grew up with Nancy, and Nancy has grown up with us. Sorta.