Our Regulars
Wisdom from TYPE Books Junction regular, Jim Lane
For the last three years, at first on Saturdays and more recently on Wednesday mornings, Jim has been coming in for a mix of non-fiction, sometimes even four books a week. He appeared to be a few decades older than me so I was curious. What does a reading life could look like in retirement? What does it mean to stockpile knowledge in a person’s later years? And where does he store all those books? So when Jim asked one of us TYPE booksellers to give a talk to his retiree social group, I jumped at the chance, though with a hidden agenda: so I could interview him back and see what wisdom he has to add to the TYPE Junction community.
- Max
Some of Jim’s recent reading:
Firstly, Greta Thunberg's The Climate Book. I bought this book out of unbounded admiration for its author: proof positive if any were needed that good things come in small packages! I probably won't live to see it but if she keeps at it as she has been doing, she may in the fullness of time be the savior of the human species. The book is a comprehensive anthology of short pieces she's assembled from about 100+ experts in every aspect of climate science, well balancing despair at the present with hope for the future. It should be required reading.
Secondly, Angela Saini's The Patriarchs: The Origins of Inequality. The author is a journalist rather than an academic making for a read that's both easier and more satisfying. Within my lifetime the reaction against what used to be called male chauvinism has spawned a version of the Golden Age Myth: the notion that, once upon a time, there were societies that were matrilineal, matrilocal, matriarchal, or some combination thereof. The point of that was that if the past had been better and different, then the future might be so also. The book sifts even-handedly through the evidence and theorizing about all that in a manner sympathetic to the aims of contemporary feminism leaving the reader hopeful for a better future.
On what Jim does with the three to 4 books a week he buys from TYPE:
I've got one of those little library box things out front. I had always wanted one, and I had my neighbor build it. I can't visualize anything worth a damn but I found a set of plans on the net for one of them, and I just downloaded and gave it to him. He put it all together and said, oh, yeah, come over, take a look at this before I finish and make sure it's right. And the damn thing was like, easily twice the size I thought it was going to be. So I got plenty of room to be putting books. So I put the TYPE bookmarks in the ones of mine that I put out there. A low form of advertising, but I guess it’s something. Books are meant to be shared. I've plundered other people's boxes on occasion, so eventually I though, I could do that. I should do that.
Jim on his early reading:
Well, there was the Hardy Boys. The selection of books that one had at that point in life was pretty limited, I have to tell you. They were okay. There was Tom Swift as well. Sci-fi. Tom Swift and His Electric Rifle and stuff like that. Kind of futuristic science, technology, the wonders of stuff like that. Hardy Boys were kind of solving crimes and stuff. Catching the bad guys.
The school I went to, miserable place had the alleged library, which was like two shelves at the back of the room, and there was stuff there. You took what was there or did without.
Well, they did have a nice municipal library in South Porcupine, where I lived. For the size of the place, wasn't bad. South Porcupine, hub of everything up at Northern Ontario [editor’s note, this seems to be in Jim’s favorite tenor: sarcastic]. You know where Timmins is? I remember what a great victory it was when I got to look behind the door where the grown up books were. I was nine or ten then. And my mother was my reading role model. The school teacher. I'm sure she had something to do with it. Looking things up was huge where I came from.
Jim on actively building community in his life:
Okay, well, I regularly attend weekly seniors groups and where that came from was a couple of things. One is my dear departed dad. When he was left a widower, the way I am now, he ended up living about the last good years of his life more or less like a hermit, nothing more. He spent his whole rest of his life sitting in front of a TV and never went anywhere, never did anything, never saw anybody. I was horrified by that thing. He went into the home after a while, so I had that as a negative example. But no way, man. Not me. What I'm going to do, it is not going to be that, right.
And then my dear departed wife, Carol, sort of went downhill very slowly. She had a bunch of neurodegenerative illnesses, part of which was expressive aphasia, which is like a failure of language and stuff. And the speech and language pathologists that were trying to treat her kept saying, oh, you get her out and kind of deal with people and talk to them and stuff. Maybe it'll help. It didn't, but it was sort of something I would have wanted to do anyway. And I sorted out these two groups and joined them and dragged her out to them while she was still capable and then after she became institutionalized I kept going on my own account because I don't want to be sitting at home. There it is.
One of the groups is called Timely Topics. It used to have regular guest speakers but it's kind of getting to the point where it's every once in a while kind of a thing now. And mostly just people sitting around talking about whatever comes into our heads, reading stories to each other sometimes and otherwise just what's going on. Socializing once a week, hour and a half. It can be about 14, 15 people.
And then the other group is called Junction Seniors. There used to be, years ago, somebody in the neighborhood who I never met, some woman who was making up a kind of a community newsletter thing, kind of chatty little stories in it. But it also had a great big long calendar of events at the end of it and it had this group mentioned in it as to when they were meeting and stuff and I remember thinking: that sounds pretty good. And I managed to find an old advert somewhere on the net that had a phone number on it. And I called this woman Margaret. She's now dead, unfortunately. Lovely person. I asked her, you're still meeting? Oh yeah, no problem. Historically it always met twice a week, Tuesday mornings and Friday afternoons. So I brought Carol off to that and joined up and then I kept going to them. Of course they shut down as soon as when the pandemic started for about a year and a half or whatever. I think there was a kind of a tough period, I guess it was kind of between Delta and Omicron or something where it kind of seemed to be stopping a little bit.
Eventually I happened to run into, actually, a couple of times I'd seen her, one of the women in the group in the subway sort of down at Yonge and Bloor, and she's like, well, what can we do? Can we get together? Sure, why not, right? So I sent out a group email. I'm kind of the conservator of the email for the group and stuff, and I sent out the things, why don't we all get together and stuff? And she sorted out the venue at Full Stop across the way, which had not been there when we had been meeting originally. She thought it all looked pretty good, and we checked it out. I don't know if you've ever been in the Full Stop over there, but there's a separate kind of back room in behind everything, which I think was made for little kids, but we've kind of colonized it. Alice, our favorite person over there, calls it her fan club.
For these kind of groups, we are all people of the same generation. We're all old timers. I'm going to be 72 shortly. Actually I'm probably one of the younger ones in some of these things. All people are of same background more or less. We all live around here. We had shared experiences in kind of the same world that we come from. So it gives you a lot in common that way.
And there seems a willingness to be nice to each other at these gatherings, if that means something. I think it's because most of the people are in these things are there for the same reason. They're looking for the same kind of thing that I want out of it. So it seems it's kind of a commonality of interest.
These groups are important because it's very easy to kind of just fade away or something. I never have been kind of naturally sociable. I'm not the kind of guy with the lamp shade on my head at parties or whatever. So things like this were never that easy for me. I always had to put out effort for it. A lot of the time I didn't. You got to kind of put out effort to make it happen. It doesn't just drop in your lap, socializing like that.
Jim on how to build more community at TYPE:
The first thing you can do is put in a couple of chairs for us old geezers to sit down. Near the front, I guess. I don't know, wherever there's room.
Put on events or something that would kind of draw people like me in. One thing I've always wanted to do and never had any chance and so on was to get into a book club. The problem with it is you'll probably discover the kind of books I read are mostly things that book club people don't like. I like nonfiction almost entirely. History, politics, environment, language. That's most of it. I've never been lucky finding one, but I always thought something socialized around books, like a reading circle or something like that would be fine.
