Monthly archive August, 2009

When I was young, my parents became friends with Bill and Roddy Cleary, owners of the first bookstore that I ever experienced. The name of the shop was Hopkins. Bill Cleary was a former Jesuit. The store was named after another Jesuit—and poet—Gerard Manley Hopkins [for a poem by Hopkins, see below]. So, really my parents fell in with fellow Catholics and poetry lovers at the same time (not to mention musicians; Mr. Cleary, who had a fine sense of humor and an encyclopedic knowledge of show tunes, had once entertained some important group for an evening when their regularly scheduled entertainment fell through. When the night was over he was offered cash or the piano and he took the piano. I always thought that was the height of musicianship and showmanship). Hopkins Bookshop was located at the time on Church Street—the most important mercantile street in downtown Burlington, Vermont. Church Street has a perfectly symmetrical, beautifully proportioned brick Unitarian Church at the head of it, and at some point in my childhood, the first four blocks in front of the church were turned into a pedestrian zone. At any rate, it meant something if you were on Church Street, [...] Read More »