Newsletter from Jay Wilcox - December 2019: On Polar Bears and Cute Little Bookstores

Good morning/afternoon/evening!

You've probably never interacted with a polar bear. Still, if you're like me, you root hard for their continued existence. Coca-Cola promised us big, fluffy polar bears, and even if we never see one in real life, our mental health depends on knowing that such animals are out there. We need the North Pole, if only in our minds.

I understand the ecological significance of melting ice caps. However, I write here of something less tangible: the comfort of picturesque points of reference, and the benefit of things that bring us no immediate benefit.

Hannah and I deliberately seek out small businesses for our Christmas shopping and more often than not leave without buying anything. Handcrafted soaps cost fifty bucks a bar. Fair-trade toothpick-dispensers cost one hundred twenty. No matter the Small-Business-Saturday deals, we'll probably never need mustache wax or handwoven bow-ties or t-shirts embroidered with swearwords and clever puns. Nobody on our shopping list requires novelty fridge magnets or bacon-flavored gum, yet Hannah and I continue through these brick-and-mortars with our locally-sourced coffee in biodegradable paper cups, politely bumping past other patrons, past precarious displays on distressed aluminum shelves. Everything is delicate, balanced. With shopkeepers, we trade local legends--about hiking trails and high school football games, vacant storefronts down the road--before inevitably leaving empty-handed, calling apologetic thank-yous as the door dings shut.

If all the polar bears died, how would that affect your life in the next five years? Would it affect your life at all?

This weekend, Hannah and I plan to return to a bookstore downtown. Out front, a chalkboard of witticisms welcomes passersby--I see its colorful fonts in my head but can't remember the words. Maybe someone in our lives would want a hardcover for Christmas. We will peruse and remember every person we know, the space smelling like ancient floorboards. This bookstore used to be someone's house, and the register sits behind a low, hand-carved balustrade.

I'd wager that even someone who seldom interacted with books would feel bummed if all their town's bookstores went extinct. Even if we "don't have time to read anymore" or "just can't get into reading anymore," we hope someone out there still prioritizes cozy relics--that someone keeps buying novels, even if it's not us.

But would the extinction of small bookstores affect our lives at all, in the Amazon era?

Amazon will always have the Thing You're Looking For™, no clerks or conversation required. Similarly, the mosquito is a much more pervasive predator than the polar bear--yet which animal captures our imaginations? We die by the millions at their mercy, yet individual mosquitoes inspire no awe. Which animal would be more fearsome, more magnificent, if you were to be trapped with them in a broom closet?

I jest, but envision such close quarters. In a shrinking world, for what will we make room?

Maybe Amazon, with their ruthless efficiency, should capture just as much wonder as all the cute mom-and-pops. Heck, with their Alexas and Echos, they're definitely capturing something. Their species thrives by eavesdropping and speaking to us in human voices--and perhaps Coca-Cola advertises with polar bears because people could never identify with a family of mosquitoes. If a company reflects its customers, maybe it's fitting that on Amazon you can order t-shirts and magnets and coasters custom-printed with images of your own face.

I think a lot about where I spend money and time, because I've heard that you pay for the world you want to live in. Downtown Frederick hangs Christmas lights over the streets, white bulbs tangling through trees, painstakingly fastened yet shaking in the wind. What love can one have for anything inefficient--anything that has to struggle to survive? If all the lights in all the trees all at once went out, how would that affect my life? I can't see these lights from my apartment but like to think that in my bones I'd feel their absence, their filaments going cold over a world of headlights and streetlamps--other lights that always shined brighter and bigger.

Infinite Regards,

Jay