The BCinDC 10th Birthday BookCrossing convention was superb in every way. Apart from the weather, and on the Saturday it was damp, to say the least. Look at Sherlockfan in her gossamer raincoat there.

Saturday’s morning experience, amongst a great many roll-yer-own adventures, was for me the Museum teaser tour. A rush along the Mall, looking at one item in all of the many great Smithsonians and museums. KateKintail, here shown highlighting the fact that the Yellow train had been relabelled “Blue” in her honour, had timed this sprint a few times and reckoned we could get through every museum and still be in time for lunch.

I don’t know – I’ve seen bookCrossers in action. They dawdle along instead of sprinting, they release books, they stop to take photographs, they make detours off the script to look at something interesting, they convert others to BookCrossing by thrusting armloads of books at them…

And if there was ever a place for interesting diversions, it’s the Smithsonians! Every one of them presented opportunities to get lost for weeks at a time, let alone the few seconds Kate had thoughtfully set aside for personal exploring.

But we did it. For me, it was a great help that I’d looked through some of these places in 2005, on my first big overseas trip, when I’d had a week to myself in DC while Kerri attended a government conference. For the others, well, it was a teaser and they’d have to come back later.

We saw so much in flickering moments. Sculpture, exhibits, historical markers, grand views, security checkpoints, puddles. And each other. I love being in the company of fellow BookCrossers on a romp through a city with bags of books.

One of my personal favorites is Washington in the garb of a Roman emperor. So ridiculous! So American! I guess he is entitled to be lionised in heroic pose, but he just seems a trifle out of place in time and place.

In the Air and Space Museum, I got to touch my third piece of moon rock in a week, after visits to Houston and Canaveral. That was a thrill.

And I saw the famous ruby slippers from The Wizard of Oz. That was cool.

Kate made sure that those of us who were participating in the scavenger hunt were led to the exhibits where the answers could be found. She didn’t go so far as to point at the answer with her umbrella, but you kind of knew where to look.

One question we had to answer was the age of the Natural History Museum’s Tyrannosaurus Rex. I struck out on my own here and asked a cleaner who was mopping up the puddles of rainwater dripping from our clothing.

“Exactly how old is that big dinosaur there?” I asked, pen poised over the answer sheet.

“Oh,” he mused, looking up at the great head full of teeth like steak knives, “He’s sixty-eight million and nine years, four months and a few days old.”

Well, I know that dating technology is getting better all the time, so I asked him, as he swung his mop, how he could be so sure. Had they run a recent test, found some documentary evidence, maybe gone back in time on a field visit?

“Nah. I started working here at the beginning of 2002, and he was sixty-eight million years old then.”

The talk was of tornadoes that day in Joplin. A massive outbreak had hit the US over the preceding few days, and here we were in tornado territory.

We were back on Route 66 after taking a few days off to see friends in Kansas City and to attend a Sister Hazel concert in Columbia, and we’d had a packed day so far, with more to come before my optimistic destination of Tulsa.

After a planned meet at the Missouri Welcome Centre just shy of the Oklahoma line fell through – closed for repairs and the off-ramp blocked – we rescheduled for Starbucks in Joplin. Discoverylover, who had helped with the navigation by slumbering in the passenger seat, a happy Sister Hazel grin on her face, now found the right location on the GPS and we headed back up I-40, going backwards at one point when our driver missed the exit.

We were hours late, the light was fading fast, but I was determined to snap that Joplin sign. You can’t do Route 66 without Joplin, Missouri!

KSReader and her BookCrossing daughter KSKid lit up the Starbucks carpark when our dusty van pulled up beside them. It was good to see these two, whom we had last seen at the Kansas City BookCrossing convention in 2009. KSReader had been one of the organising crew, and KSKid had helped Discoverylover launch a book into a fountain one evening.

Anyway, we hugged, smiled, chatted, swapped books and grinned at each other. BookCrossing is like that – a global community of happy people sharing books, quirkiness, generosity and love. I suggested getting a group shot by the sign a couple of hundred metres away, and although KSReader suggested driving, I said I needed the exercise after lunching at Lambert’s Cafe in Sprinfield.

America is not set up for pedestrians. It must have taken the best part of half an hour to struggle across the road get the shot, walk back along the grassy verges and collapse into Starbucks for a round of hot drinks and some more bookswapping.

And then we made our goodbye hugs, said we’d be glad to see them in Australia and/or New Zealand, and hit the road. There’s a long stretch of Route 66 running through town, and we followed it out into the last few miles of Missouri, and over the border into Kansas. Not much of the old road in Kansas, but we made the most of the thirteen miles over several night hours. But that’s another story, the story of the mailbox in the middle of the road.

Joplin was fine when we left it, but like a visit to pre-war Hiroshima, we should have taken more time and photographs. On 23 May 2011, Joplin was hit by a huge tornado, destroying about half of the town, including our Starbucks, and killing more than a hundred people. Poor Joplin! That happy hour in my memory will now be forever tinged by sadness.

The meal

Kansas City – in Kansas – on a Saturday night. We headed off to Legends, a vast shopping mall built around a racetrack and sportsfields. An island building in the huge carpark, Cheeseburger in Paradise was our destination. There were thirty hungry BookCrossers to be fed. Just one of those convention meals that arise. You know how it goes.

“Say, where we all eating tonight?”

“Anywhere you want, honey.”

“We thought we’d ask a local. Like you.”

“Well, there’s this cheeseburger place that’s kind of fun. There’s a Books-A-Million branch nearby…”

“I’m sold!”

And before you know it, half the convention is joining you for dinner and you need a whole bunch of tables.

The song

I’ve been listening to Jimmy Buffett since the 1980s. His bouncy ballads of island life and margaritas and sailing and just lazing about have hit my buttons. Perfect for conjuring up a different lifestyle when your own is full of grey clouds and storms. He’ll have you smiling by the end of the first track, tapping your toes in the second, and if you haven’t got a party going with jugs full of cold drinks halfway through the album, you’re in serious trouble.

Cheeseburger in Paradise is a typical bit of Buffett fluff. It sold about a bazillion copies, and it describes the perfect meal for a sailor finishing a cruise where the only food left aboard is peanut butter and beans. This is the meal Jimmy was dreaming about:

…at night I’d have these wonderful dreams
Some kind of sensuous treat
Not zucchini, fettucini, or bulgar wheat
But a big warm bun and a huge hunk of meat

Cheeseburger in paradise
Heaven on earth with an onion slice
Medium rare with mustard’d be nice
Not too particular, not too precise
I’m just a cheeseburger in paradise

I like mine with lettuce and tomato
Heinz 57 and french fried potatoes
Big kosher pickle and a cold draught beer
Well, good god Almighty which way do I steer?

The plate

I stuck to the Jimmy Buffett prescription exactly. Apart from the medium rare part. I don’t hold with minced meat being anything less than cooked all the way through. Fine for a steak to be pink inside, but with mince, some of the original surface could be in the middle of the pattie. You want any germs that may have been on the surface to be well and truly cooked out.

I was also driving, so I swapped out the cold draft beer for a mug of root beer. Well, it’s beer, innit?

Whatever, the meal was one to dream about, and one to remember fondly forever. You can bet every time I hear that song, I’ll be back in Kansas City!

The burger was superb, the service smiling and perky from some young thing who looked like she’d just come from her day job as a waitress at a tropic beach resort, and the atmosphere was good fun, the decor themed down to Hawai’ian labels on the restrooms. Windsurfers, palms, sails and shells. Food and drinks to match. I loved it. It was perfect.

The place

We were staying in Overland Park at the DoubleTree, and there’s actually another Cheeseburger in Paradise restaurant closer to the hotel, but we went off to Legends. I plugged the closer one into the GPS just to make sure if we lost the car we were following, and all the way there the GPS would tell us to do a u-turn and it was “Recalculating, dammit”. I was certain that the people ahead had made a serious mistake and we’d eventually have to turn around and go all the way back, late for dinner.

Quite a drive, and I was lost after about the sixth big highway! It was a relief to find a park and see the big neon sign, with a platoon of hungry BookCrossers outside.

Books-A-Million at Legends

The Art of Racing in the Rain: A Novel

This was also the place where I discovered Maurice Sendak, reading his Where the Wild Things Are to Discoverylover, and being arterly charmed.

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The BookCrossing

BookCrossing is this crazy American idea where you go to the BookCrossing.com website, enter some details about your book, get an ID number which you write on the book (usually on a label which gives instructions) and then release it “into the wild” on a park bench, a coffeeshop table, on a cable car…

Or in this case, into one of the many fountains in Legends in Kansas City. Here’s Discoverylover from New Zealand setting one free:

There is nothing quite like getting a bunch of BookCrossers together and doing crazy stuff, just giving books away!

–Skyring

Resources

• The restaurant website
• The Wikipedia entry for the song
• The Wikipedia entry for the restaurant chain

Quint set down his mugs, sliding one across the counter to Ann. She was looking at him, looking at his cheek. “I got..” he began. “I was… Ah… I hurt myself.”

“So I see,” Ann replied. “Sorry to hear it. And Harley here cut himself shaving, maybe.”

Quint considered the other man in the shop. A taxidriver he’d used previously, bearing a bandaid on his cheek and a mug of coffee in his hand. Odd. He’d left Heartbake just before Quint, carrying two mugs. Where was the other one?

The other man extended his hand. “Harley. Cabbie. Booklover. Careless shaver.”

Quint shook hands briefly. “Am I interrupting anything? You wanted coffee, Ann.”

“Thanks, William. You’re a sweetie. Harley was just telling me about BookCrossing.”

BookCrossing. Giving away perfectly good books to strangers. Quint couldn’t understand it at all, but Ann took a strange amount of fun from the disease, often closing the shop for weeks at a time while she travelled to conventions where fellow-sufferers gathered to discuss their symptoms.

“Not my cup of tea, Ann. You tried to sign me up, remember?”

“You either get it or you don’t.”

Quint nodded. “Like a cold.”

“I caught it off Ann,” Harley said. “Anyway, I was on the airport rank yesterday, and I had a couple of spare seconds, so I whipped out and released a book against one of the pillars. This book.”

He held out a book. Quint took it. A hand-scrawled note stuck onto the dustjacket, the endpapers defaced with numbers and another sticker, more marks on the fore-edge. He winced at the wilful destruction.

“That makes a Very Good book into Fair. Might have been worth maybe three dollars originally, but now you couldn’t give it away.”

“Yeah. Tell me about it. Anyway, last night I got pulled over by the cops, and they asked me about this book, and told me to come in to the main cop shop this morning. Which I did, on top of everything else.”

“They arrested you for littering,” Quint guessed. He didn’t like litterbugs,

“Cops don’t care. I was awake all night worrying about it. And other things. So when I gave my name at the counter, and they took me into a room full of blokes in suits, I was shitting myself.

“They all stood up and had a go at me. They took turns. First cab off the rank was the police commissioner. In full uniform. He said that I was responsible for closing down the airport for two hours, and did I have any idea of the trouble I’d caused?

“Then there was the airport manager, and he really laid into me. He was spraying spit at the end, and he looked like he was going to punch me. Trouble is, everyone else was egging him on. You could see it.

“Anyway, he sat down, and the Qantas bloke stood up and asked if I knew how much it had cost to divert flights. Then the Virgin manager said exactly the same thing. Hundreds of thousands of dollars. I was going to get a bill from them. Then another policeman from bomb disposal blew me up. Said I was putting the lives of his best men at risk. The Urban Services Minister was there too, and he had the hide to tell me I was an idiot. I started to give him a serve about his useless bloody roadworks but the Ambulance manager sat me down again.

“The army guy got up and looked at me and asked if I knew how much it cost to put a helicopter in the air and would I like to apologise to the SAS guys yanked away from their training on a wild goose chase. But I lost it when the construction company boss asked if I knew how much it cost to pull his road crew off.”

“Uh-oh,” Ann groaned. “What did you do?”

“I told him I could arrange a group booking. Then the police chief made this weird noise, told me not to do it again, and to get the hell out of his sight.”

Ann snorted.

“Yeah. Like that except lower.”

Quint wasn’t sure if he liked this taxi driver. But he could see that Ann had made up her mind. And she’d been drinking his coffee, after sending Quint out for a mug.

“All that for you?” she said. “Poor Harley!”

“They were having a security conference,” Quint said. He’d read it in the paper. The airport terminal was being upgraded and it was going to have the most comprehensive security in Australia.

“They didn’t tell me that,” Harley groaned. “I thought it was just for me, and I’d never get out of jail long enough to pay out the fine.”

“How did they know it was you?” Quint asked.

“They have a security camera on the taxi rank. They make sure we pay our two dollars to get through the boomgate out of the cabyard. So they knew it was my cab. And then they put the numberplate into the police computer. They have this high tech camera that looks at numberplates, and if it’s a stolen car or you haven’t paid your rego, they flag you down.”

Quint liked this. Good system.

“At least they gave you the book back,” Ann pointed out. “They could have blown it up”

“I’m going to leave it at the train station next.”

“Train drivers can’t read,” Ann twinkled back. “Not timetables. No way!”

“You could put it on your Official BookCrossing Zone shelf.” Harley said.

“Would you be a sweetie and do that for me?”

“I’m at your command, Ms Ounce!” Harley drained his mug, gave a mock salute and marched out.

Ann gazed after him. Quint set his cup down and pulled over the spreadsheet listing the books he’d bought from Violet Campbell. He had to be careful here.

“I need to talk to that old lady with the books. Have you collected yours yet?”

Ann sighed. “I’ve got a friend with a van. She helped me load them last night. Is there a problem?”

“You might want to check through them for personal items. Bookmarks, photographs. I found a few things last night she might want back.”

Copyright © 2009 Peter Mackay

Ann liked this bit. She entered the bakery and the barista – her barista! – smiled at her. “The usual, Ann?”

Her smile was joy. “Yes please, Ben! I’ll put these books on the shelf and be right back.”

The Heartbake manager had let her set up an OBCZ – an Official BookCrossing Zone – in a corner. Ann had stocked a small shelf with free books, each registered and labelled with its BookCrossing ID. A sign read “FREE BOOKS!”

The shelf had a steady turnover. Reading a free book while having coffee: a perfect match!

She arranged her latest paperbacks on the top shelf, moving older titles lower. If they staid too long on the shelf, she “wild released” them into the world somewhere. A park bench. A bus stop.

A new book caught her eye. Not one of hers. 44 Scotland Street by Alexander McCall Smith. A delightful book by a favorite author, and some kind customer had donated it.

Ann glanced inside. Not registered on BookCrossing.com. Not yet.

She returned with the book. Barista Ben had her latte ready and she bent over the cake display in her Mark Twain t-shirt. A lot to be said for a tight top.

“A smiley cake today, please!”

He gave her a smile and put the cake on a plate. She paid, and made her happy way to her own shop. Definitely making headway with Ben.

Ounce Books was her little kingdom. Queendom. Princessipality. Whatever, it was all hers and she loved it.

To tell the truth, it was a fake. Campbell residents might buy a paperback novel here and there, but the big business was done online. Quality second-hand nonfiction and good first editions. More than once she’d made several hundred dollars profit from a single book.

She had a copy of Leni Reifenstahl’s Schönheit im olympischen Kampf, a classic 1937 large format book of stills from Reifenstahl’s documentary of the 1936 “Nazi” Olympics in Berlin. She’d paid two hundred dollars, but it was worth an easy six, maybe seven hundred. Postage would be a killer, though. It was heavy.

She took a bite of her cake, sipped her coffee and turned to the book she’d picked up in the cafe. On the BookCrossing.com website – permanently open on her computer – she clicked the “Register book” link, entered title and author, and the site gave her a ten digit number, which she copied onto a printed instruction label. This went inside the front cover. Outside, more stickers with the site logo of a little yellow book running away on stick legs, arms pumping as it headed for freedom.

She had attended the World BookCrossing Convention in Christchurch earlier that year. The combination of New Zealand’s spectacular fall scenery, great friends, and a lightning romance had made it a weekend to treasure. She had stayed on for a precious week with Tom, who ferried yachts about the South Pacific.

It had been pure magic, but they talked long into that final night, agreeing that their different lives ruled out anything permanent. They chatted on the internet when Tom had a break ashore, but even that contact was cooling.

Ben had possibilities. Younger than Tom, but so very handsome! A pity that his interest in books was slim. He came into the shop to collect cups, but their relationship was mostly pursued in the fragrant atmosphere of Heartbake.

Ann was ready for another whiff. She drained her latte, set it on the empty plate, picked up the freshly registered novel and went next door, smiling her way in.

Nobody on the counter, so she went to the back of the cafe and set the new book on the top shelf, glancing sideways into the kitchen, hoping for a glimpse of Ben.

There he was, and her heart skipped a happy beat before exploding. Locked in an embrace that linked bodies from toes to tongues with never a gap between, Ben and some skinny young blonde were making their own heat in the kitchen.

Ann wasn’t sure how she came to be sitting down at her own counter, alone but for an expensive old German book losing value with each teardrop.

Oh, Tom, Tom. Where was he now? Alone on some swelling ocean when he should be here, comforting her, caressing her, whispering love, telling her she was beautiful.

Just a few days, and so many happy memories. Driving down a scenic highway, snow-capped mountains to either side, golden leaves of fall in glorious splashes on the green meadows. Holding hands in the back seat. Walking in the glowing evening. Kissing beneath a smiling moon.

Tom’s smell had made her shiver as he ran his fingers through her hair, his lips soft on her cheek, her neck, her shoulders.

The first time they’d undressed each other, she had gasped at the glory of him. Tanned from ten thousand summer sea miles, trim and muscled from hauling on ropes and balancing his weight on a rolling deck.

The salty taste of his skin as she kissed his chest through a tangle of dark hair. The hardness of muscle, the blaze of his eyes, the sweet joy as his hands moved on her body.

Oh, Tom!

She opened the book, looking at pictures of Greek temples and columns. Marble athletes coming to life in Riefenstahl’s camera as naked gymnasts posed and moved and hurled the discus, the javelin. One tousled athlete was the image of a younger Tom, skin taut over perfect muscles beneath.

She stroked the page, remembering the times afterwards, hearts slowing, fingers entwining, bodies touching. Her head on his chest as he told sea stories. The light in his eyes as he looked at her telling of her own adventures in life and dreams for the future.

Oh Tom! Come to life for me, darling. Leap out of that book and hold me tight.

She looked up from the page, and saw through misty eyes a man in front of her.

Copyright © 2009 Peter Mackay