By Scott Graber
It is early, still dark, and I’m sitting on our wooden deck In Port Royal. When Susan wakes — in about an hour — we will get into our Honda Fit and head north to Massachusetts.
In the year 2000, my wife received a small inheritance. With that money she bought a maple-floored, basketball-sized space in a four-storied brick building that was being converted from an abandoned textile mill into “artist’s lofts.”
I worried about this purchase because the Eclipse Mill is located in North Adams, Mass., roughly 1,000 miles from Beaufort.
“Is my marriage in trouble?” I wondered.
“No, Scott, I’m not leaving you,” she said loading her paint brushes into our Volvo 240. “But you’re a ‘needy person’ — requiring constant attention and, frankly, I need a break.”
And so began a time when Susan would spend two months — usually in the fall and spring — in this old mill that was also home to 40 other artists. During these times, I would fend for myself — finding a friend in processed cheese, Wheat Thins and microwaveable popcorn. But on some weekends I would drive over to Savannah and catch a three-hour flight, sometimes direct and more like two hours, into the Albany Airport.
In those early days, the Mill people were young, irreverent and almost every weekend they would show their work in one of the storefront galleries popping-up in North Adams, Pittsfield and Lenox. Most were visual artists although there were sculptors, documentary film makers and writers in the mix. (One writer, Andrea Barrett, was a McArthur Fellow, published, and moderately famous.)
Early on, I met Grover Askins.
Grover was older; retired from the New York publishing business; and ran a used-and-rare book business out of his first-floor loft. I gravitated to this man because I was into fiction; wanting to read the great storytellers I had not read in college; aspiring to be a fiction-writer myself.
Grover was like Google when it came to books — actually when it came to any topic. “Grover” I would say, “I want something inter-generational; something involving war, something with romance; something with drinking and, of course, betrayal and bull fighting.”
He would look at a four foot high pyramid of books and pull out “Heart of the Matter” by Graham Greene saying,“This has most of what you want.” In this way I was introduced to Wallace Stegner, Ian McEwan and Bruce Chatwin. Looking back, I think I might have “discovered” Evelyn Waugh, E.M. Forster and Margaret Atwood on my own; but it would be a mistake to think I relied on Grover’s encyclopedic, Google-like guidance for fiction only.
When I was planning a four day hike along Hadrian’s Wall and wanted the backstory, Grover gave me three books relating to the topic. When I wanted to recall details of a speech by a Wehrmacht tank commander — Hans Speidel — Grover found a history of his unit on D-Day. When I wanted to know what to see in nearby Hudson, N.Y., Grover gave me a thin, yellowing guide written by the WPA in 1935.
Notwithstanding this knowledge, Grover has had a tough go with his book business in recent years. This is the result of Amazon and the ease of ordering an ancient, author-signed edition of, say, “Crime and Punishment.”
“They’ve just about put me out of business,” he said one day as we sat in the garden.
But there are still those who like the hunt and make a trip from Boston on the weekends. And when they enter his loft they enter a space where (nearly) every cubic inch is occupied by books — books that are not arranged by author, topic or color. A system that requires one to ask, “What have you got on British-built railroads in Colonial India?”
Grover will rise from behind his desk saying, “That’s a pretty broad category. Can you be more specific? Is there a gauge that interests you? A route? Perhaps a derailment?”
Harvard says that longevity is based — to some extent — on the friends one makes. Apparently friends keep you connected, caring, curious and healthy.
I don’t know how many miles I have left in the tank, but a few of those miles will be spent in a garden adjacent the Hoosic River in the company of Grover Askins. We will share a bottle of a reasonably priced red and talk of dead kings.
Scott Graber is a lawyer, novelist, veteran columnist and longtime resident of Port Royal. He can be reached at cscottgraber@gmail.com.
