lots of little feet shuffling through Shakespeare

20 eight-year-olds from a bilingual school toured the bookstore yesterday. The older a person gets the harder it seems to imagine what the world looks/feels like through eight year old eyes, but as I stood in front of them, speaking briefly about how I sleep upstairs, living in the library, their eyes went wide at such a thought.

That moment energy, with their young minds spinning and imaginations running wild, captured what I often miss sight of on any given day here at Shakespeare and Co, forgetting that such an existence, viewed through the eyes of a child, can evoke some of that same magic that one finds from those tall tales told by Lewis Carroll or E. B. White or Shel Sliverstein or, or, or.

The kids wrapped up the stairs, past the beds and the books, gathering in the library, where my friend and fellow Shakespeare inhabitant Dylan and I took turns reading from “THE GRUFFLO” while the other half went to the top floor to say hello to George, who opened the bookstore in 1951. He will turn 97 next month. -Now- I can only imagine what that experience was like for those little minds.