A Love Letter to East Bay Booksellers (But All Indies, Really)

I wrote this for a fundraiser for East Bay Booksellers that happened shortly after their store burned down in a fire. And while it’s very much about that store, it’s about indies in general, of which I am a forever supporter. Happy Independent Bookstore Day to us all, except Jeff Bezos.

Of Pigeons and Bookstores

I heard that we never see baby pigeons because pigeon parents nurse their offspring until they’re fully grown. I think at some point I substantiated it with a cursory google search, but it could be apocryphal. I haven’t really put my best efforts into proving it or not because it’s the kind of thing I like to believe. And what harm is there really, in me believing in loving pigeon parents, doting on adolescent teen pigeons until they’re ready to meet the world as their adult self? Sometimes I just need something nice to believe in. 

Here’s what I know about pigeons for sure: they are wherever we are. Pigeons exist on every continent except Antarctica, and to be fair there is no population of humans indigenous to Antarctica either. Their populations swell where our populations swell, and we curse them as they crowd our cities, scraping a living from the leavings of civilization. We urge people not to feed them, but inevitably some soft-hearted someone always does. They are sometimes vectors for infectious diseases. We build all manner of anti-pigeon technology, erect spikes along our buildings so they cannot perch there and poop prodigiously all over the human industry of which we are so proud.

And yet— if there is a single space between the spikes, a pigeon will settle there. Maybe out of spite. Maybe out of necessity. Or maybe just because pigeons live by a strict if it fits I sits lifestyle. 

I cannot claim to know the mind of a pigeon. 

But I can claim to have never seen one pigeon that looked exactly like another. That some boast a ring of iridescent feathers around their neck, and others may be speckled, and yet others still who are nearly all white, or all black, or all gray. I have seen lots of pigeons who are missing a foot. More still who look as though they flew directly threw a tornado of trash before pecking for crumbs on the sidewalk we share. 

I also know I find large flocks of them unnerving, just as I find large crowds of humans unnerving. And that once, while walking down Haight Street in San Francisco, in a fit of over confident frivolity, I tried to scare a pigeon by lunging at it, which provoked it to lunge back at me, its wingbeats suddenly cacophonous and frankly terrifying in my face. I was the one who backed down, not the pigeon, and I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that ever since then I have treated the entire species with markedly more respect. 

I think what I like best about pigeons is that I feel they are the species of animals that humans deserve. Often, people will appropriate the term spirit animal, and that’s not what I mean here. When I say they’re the animal we deserve, I mean they’re the animal we should see, as a species, when we look into the mirror. They are our soul twins, for better and for worse. Pigeons and humans have co-evolved to share our space and our filth, and to be unsettlingly populous on a planet that could do with less of both of us. Pigeons reflect back at us the grime and muck that we have created and I think we unfairly resent them for that. They wear our pollution without shame or self-consciousness and I think we begrudge them for that, too. As if we were better than that, knowing all the while that we are not even as we kick our shoes off at the door.

All this, and yet these are still the birds who nurse their young until they are fully grown. All this gunge and grotesquery and yet they still yield such tenderness. I look at each fully grown pigeon I see eating directly from a dumpster and remind myself that not long ago that pigeon’s parents nursed it until it was comically grown bird in a very lazy nest—

—this is a side note, but have you ever seen a pigeon’s nest? They put zero effort into construction, it is often a literal bunch of sticks on the ground, like someone had thrown them there in a fit of annoyance and simply never asked themself if they could do better, I adore them—

—anyway, a comically grown bird in a very lazy nest until, one day, it’s finally ready to put wings to flight and leave. I wonder sometimes, is it a binary choice? Are they there and then gone? Or do they sometimes return to the place where they were tended, nostalgic for an easier time? Maybe it depends on the bird. I know it depends on the person. 

If it is not clear, I love pigeons. I love them for their filth and their care. I love them just like I love people. With a sense that perhaps we are something better than the sum total of our actions, but probably not. I love them for highlighting for me the great contradiction of humanity, too: that we are capable of such incredible destruction and cruelty. But also that we are capable of staggering imagination and creation. That one will always coexist with the other. That no matter our accomplishment, we will never be so far from the tender animal inside of us that just wants to sit where we fit, and be loved. 

When I feel particularly pessimistic about humans, I try to remember the pigeons of it all. I try to think about what we do that is equal to the cosmic imbalance in favor of the suffering we cause. And when I find myself in that state of mind, which is often, I walk to my bookstore, my local, East Bay Booksellers. It’s just a couple blocks from my home. And I immediately visit the staff pick wall. 

As an author I am keenly aware that every book is somebody’s precious something. An idea nurtured until it was fully grown, into something that anyone else might be interested in. I am also keenly aware that there are more books than I will ever read, and that in turn the books I write will not be read by most people. 

But when I visit that staff pick shelf, I am reminded of the tenderness of humans, and our great potential. That in books we mark ourselves as creatures of creation, but not only that, social animals bent on sharing our most intimate and meaningful experiences with others. We experience worlds as complex and harrowing and heartbreaking and beautiful as the one we share with pigeons, completely within our own minds and NOT ONLY that, but then we also build shrines to those narratives, and within those shrines we erect pedestals. 

A bookstore represents acts of love and worship and care in layer after layer. And a bookstore like East Bay Booksellers is the kind of store that does this best. That revels in the particular taste of each of its booksellers, makes space for them to lift the work that matters to them most for others to see and appreciate and support. I know an Adelaide pick from a Brad pick from a Thu pick from an Elizabeth pick. I recognize their handwriting, and have some small sense of each of their minds, in the exact manner in which each of them cared to share it. I am invited to this space even when I am cranky or gassy or unpleasant, to be immersed in endless rings of individualist wonder.

And if that is not worth saving, then I do not know what is.