McHuston Booksellers

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Tag: broken arrow bookstores (Page 109 of 114)

Spittin’ and Sputterin’

July 2, 2012 /

When droplets of water began appearing on the windshield while I was driving to work, I naturally assumed that a hose or some other part of the car had broken. I mean – it couldn’t be rain, could it?

I was still trying to figure it out when I noticed that the morning sun was, in fact, shielded by a cloud, the sort that looks like rain, or at least a hint of a possibility.

That’s probably what fell on the car, that little trace of a hint.

In a matter of seconds, the sun reemerged and the drops on the front glass had evaporated. There wasn’t even enough time to think about turning on the wiper blades. Thankful that the car was still running just fine, I tooled on in to the store.

Usually, the extreme heat comes later in the summer. Truth to tell, we are barely into the summer season officially and we’ve already had a long taste of triple digits. Broken Arrow officials scrambled over the weekend to repair a water pump that forced mandatory rationing for part of the day. Leaves are falling from underwatered trees and areas of grass that aren’t sufficiently hit by irrigation system watering are beginning to yellow.

We’ve had some rain over the past months in northeastern Oklahoma, enough to green up the plants over the spring months. Other parts of the country are still suffering drought, and Colorado, New Mexico, and Texas residents have faced raging fires that are the result of the dry conditions and the arid winds.

The 4th of July always produced some fireworks-related fires. Hopefully, those who plan to celebrate in that fashion will keep in mind the particularly dangerous enterprise it will be this year.

The up-side of the dry weather is the estate and garage sale season can proceed without rain-out. If you’re winding up your sale and find you’ve got books left over and don’t want to stack them back in the house, bring them by the store.

We’ll find a home for them.

Something new under the sun.

June 26, 2012 / / 0 Comments

It is certainly hard to miss now, at least if you are driving down Main Street in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma. Them’s some big letters.

The first bit of official advertising for the new location is courtesy of an alteration to the storefront awning.

I’ve been asked why I didn’t put the name up there instead of Books & Bistro. There’s a pretty simple answer: When someone says “I’m going to McDonald’s,” there is no question about what they’re after. I don’t anticipate ever getting to that degree of notoriety, so I figured it would make more sense to describe what is inside the store rather than who owns it.

Besides – when paying by the letter, “McHuston Booksellers & Irish Bistro” adds up to a pretty penny.

As for the looks, I could not be happier. The letters are larger than I had imagined they would be, a pleasing surprise, and already someone has come in after parking to check out the inside of the place.

Sometimes I ask how a customer found the store and sometimes I don’t, but I know from visitors at the old location that the sign out front was my best advertising expenditure. Compare to the sign expense, I paid a lot more for newspaper ads over the five years at Oak Crest shopping center, but it might have been a better idea to just put that money toward a newer, bigger sign.

Did you ever spot one of the newspaper ads?

Goes to show ya.

I am in hopes that the awning will do the same thing toward drawing in customers as the vinyl lettered plywood sign did. (That’s now parked at the back door, slightly faded, but doing what it can from that vantage point.)

Maybe I’ll take down the HP printer paper sign that I taped up to the inside of the glass, the one that inspired a woman to tell me, “It looks like it was made on a computer.”

The lettering on the awning, on the other hand, looks pretty official.

Turn on the waterworks.

June 25, 2012 /

I’m a word nut.

There. I’ve admitted it. There is probably a group with ten steps for people like me, those of us who hate the idea of losing great words to non-usage, words like obstreperous and vexed.

It vexes me greatly when the boys grow obstreperous over their videogames at two in the morning, when I’m sleeping.

Sometimes even a word hound gets thrown for a loop. Then, there is that occasion when word-ists get incensed at the misusage of common terms, and it turns out to be regularly found – simply confined to another part of the country.

Back before the internet (back before me, as a matter of fact), a fellow from North Carolina named William Edgerton wrote a paper on the usage of the words spigot and spicket. In his very simplistic unscientific survey, he asked his college-aged students to report what words were used in their childhood home to describe that device that released water from the pipes into the kitchen sink.

The results?

His students were nearly unanimous in submitting the term – spicket.

I did not grow up in North Carolina, although my distant ancestors lived in the very area in which Mr. Edgerton conducted his study. Many terms in the vocabulary I learned at home had been handed down over the generations, words like “fix” to describe the assembling of a sandwich, as in: Will you fix me a sandwich?

In fact, I was called out on that one in Rhode Island, when the fellow at the deli counter replied, “No, I can’t fix something that isn’t broken.” It took me a second or two to understand what he was talking about. I had used the word in that context my entire life and assumed it to be universal rather than regional. I discovered much later that the usage in that context was a crude translation from Gaelic, in which no single word could adequately express the same intention. Because of the distinct settlement patterns of the early Scots-Irish, the term became a regionalism.

Spicket?

I’ve never heard it said that way, despite Mr. Edgerton’s survey results. It was spigot, with a G, when it was ever heard, although I grew up with the term “faucet.” Turn on the faucet and brush your teeth. Turn on the tap?

Never.

Apparently a lot of others across the US had something different in their houses, because I’ve never seen a spicket once, that I know of. But enough of that. I need to fix a sandwich.

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