Bill

Bill is the elite bookseller in my small town. I sell ten books and Bill sells one nice, pricey sweetheart of a book. When Bill has a really good day, he sells a nice historic piece that would be my salary for half the year now. He is a well-known antiquarian book dealer and he is great at it... A regular master of books who does charitable events where he can appraise a book without electronic back-up. He also has about thirty years of stock on me. I remember his store when I was in high school. He deserves everything he has and gets too, in my humble opinion. When I was down on my luck, he was a great mentor and went out of his way to me. Besides that, I believe he gave his all to put three children through college including one that needed special medical attention growing up. He has been out there fighting for the poor and oppressed and even helped out one of the new-poor, namely me. Bill has probably done more for this world than I can say.

Not all the dealers are so fond of the "internet set" getting in on the business or would lift a finger to help anyone trying to do so. All the dealers in many fields have watched their stock prices drop in recent years and are a bit bitter although resigned. Many have gone out of business to the big boys like Barnes and Noble. The rise of Ebay taught us about how much more stuff there was everywhere than we had ever guessed. I would love to have a walk-in shop, but those days might be close to over unless you have the ability to have a set-up with millions of dollars in stock like Borders. The economics of having a place to go and sip coffee as a local book store are too rough, even when you might possibly be mad. There are a few niche markets like the college towns where it is just a happy business to "squeak by" in. I have a dark book dungeon where everything is covered up looking like the owners are away on holiday and a bright virtual shop online. The only one sipping tea and coffee at it is me reading away at the thousands of book jackets and recording ISBN numbers.

This day Bill and I went to the "bag your own books sale," where an entire bag of books cost $5. We had to get up very early and drive off in the barely lit morning hours. If the sale really had 47,000 books as they advertised, that means that at least half of the books were still inside the building. No one would let us in there to see those. I left the sale after a while because of the crowd, my tiredness, and the necessity of waiting hours more for more stuff. I packed several mean, tight bags of books and just let them explode in my truck as I hit the bumps on the way home. Here I am, the new low rider with several hundred pounds of books packed into my car that has 147,000 miles on it. I never had so much mileage on a car even as a teenager. Sometimes when I take corners, I have to put my right arm up to stop the book-slide from my passenger seat. The brakes still work.

As I was driving home to my street I noticed all the road kill from the early morning was gone. I was thinking how all those critters got up really early to get all the dead stuff for their days meals. I pondered the thought of someone else's discards being gone through on the book tables by several hundred people and realized it was the same. Several of them would need the books to survive and no one was really using them anymore anyway. "If these animals who cleaned up the street were people, they would certainly be book dealer's," I thought and expressed to Bill. Bill informs me that, "Some of them are book dealers."

The vulture has become my book dealer totem. Some say there is so much emphasis on meditation, traveling, and ritualistic ways of finding signs and totems, that it is almost forgotten that signs come to us every day. The vulture must be my totem. Where I live there is a lot of nature besides the poor fur balls flattened in the street. Animals are always running around. I see frogs and toads when I am mowing the lawn. Deer bed in my back yard. Hardly a day of summer passes without me seeing a cricket or a grasshopper.


One of my teachers years ago was a Native American. She would tell us how she watches the birds and animals as she drives and they tell her things about traffic conditions. Now and then, she even gets a warning of a speed trap. This can be a wonderful thing, especially if you have got a vehicle with really fast hooves.


To me, it seems that sometimes an animal will act in such a way that is highly unusual. This is when I understand that there is a message for me. Recently, I had such an occurrence. I was just having the most wonderful day. Some of the 98 degree heat disappeared, and the weather turned quite balmy. As I drove down Lovers Lane, which is the closest road accessing anything that might be a route around here, a turkey vulture flew over my little blue car. This bird did not fly past the car however, he continued to glide just above the hood of my car. I took my foot off the accelerator and let my car coast too. The vulture stayed gliding over the hood for quite a while, which is very strange and I am not sure how he could figure out it was possible to accomplish. Finally he lifted and instead of gliding over the hood, he now glided directly over my sunroof where I could clearly see him. I took turns looking at the road and up at the bird, now accelerating slightly. Towards the end of Lovers Lane, we both turned off in different directions.


Some people might think that it is really bad omen to have a vulture flying over you. "Hey! I am not dead!" they might yell in their minds. Not yet anyway. However, I happen to know that the vulture is very special in many cultures and stories. A vulture can glide on the wind using very little energy. Sometime the vulture is also called the Golden Purifier since it cleans up what is dead of what is no longer used, preventing the spread of diseases to the living. It is also noted that the vulture does not take life to survive and it does not feed off crops. There is a well known story where the vulture tricks the trickster. It is one of the very few who has the kind of power to do this!


Striving to be a holy trickster myself, I was happy to see the bird and wonder what this message might be. Could it be about cunning and guile? Perhaps the message is to use the power that is already there just as the vulture glides on the winds created by the earth. This may be how I can continue to approach martial arts after my accident. I stepped out of the car at the post office and saw small cottonwood seeds swirling in small dust devils at my feet. The energies seemed to be telling me about current and flow. There were so many dust devils swirling on the pavement and everyone seemed to walk right past without noticing. They never even turned their heads to see them.


Things were flowing for me that Friday. I stopped at the health food store. All these people that I don't know smiled at me, said hello, and made nice comments. Someone loved my dress. Another woman wanted to tell me about what she had found. The cashier smiled and spoke to me. The man in front of me in line made nice conversation and the other man behind me joined in. Everyone seemed so happy. The winds must be blowing well. Soon I will be cleaning up the scraps at another book table. It is the way of the book dealer to make sure that any knowledge that anyone might pay for is squeezed out to the last possible drop before the book is less than a corpse.