Travel Blog

My friend from St. Pete had a couple free hours yesterday afternoon so I showed him around Fort Lauderdale. Our first stop was the Old Florida Bookshop on Griffin Road. Dave is also a writer, and I knew he’d enjoy seeing the store’s high, book-lined walls inside a nondescript strip mall. William the owner told me that business was booming; apparently, someone had posted about the store on Instagram and people were now flocking to it. (My article about his shop a few years ago didn’t have quite the same effect.) And, to William’s surprise, the majority of new customers were young women. I mentioned that the majority of readers were women, but he said that, traditionally, they were not frequenters of used bookstores. As someone who is, I knew exactly what he meant. Years ago, visiting Larry McMurtry’s used bookstore in Archer City, Texas, I had noted the “asocial, middle-aged men on a mission,” adding that “you find few giggly girls in the stacks of secondhand bookstores.”

I bought a slim volume of poems by Edgar Lee Masters and we got in the car and drove to Holiday Park, as I wanted to show Dave the new Iceplex. Quite a few cars sat in the parking lot, which surprised me, as I had checked the website and seen that no Panthers practice was scheduled. Entering the chill, we saw a handful of young women practicing figure skating on the first rink, one of them tethered to a kind a harness that connected to a short pole that her coach held to keep her from falling during jumps. We walked upstairs and found the second rink filled with children while sweatered mothers sat chatting in the stands. The sight of South Florida kids ice skating on their day off from school for a hurricane was as rich as the thought of young women haunting secondhand bookstores.