It's never too late to follow a dream

Our review of the eBay search tool we promised will be coming this weekend, sorry for the delay.

A fantastic story about following a dream came to us via the Old Bookstore group on Yahoo. It comes from Lera of
The Novel Shoppe. – Thanks Lera.

****************************************

May I take a moment and share my “story” with you. First, a little
history and scene-setting.

Without giving away my age, I will share with you that I am a
grandmother of 12, mother of 4, wife of 1 and daughter of 1. For many
years my husband and I owned an auto body repair shop (far cry from
the book world) and we worked side by side to make it a reputable,
fair and honest body shop. My mother-in-law died, my father-in-law
developed Altzheimer’s and my husband dealt with those problems by
absenting himself from the business, leaving me to run it all alone.
Now, please understand that I am a woman and although I love
Corvettes and a few other cars, that is a love that is not extended
to anything beyond looking at or driving. Which resulted in my
running a business that was more my husband’s than mine, and
continuing his dream, not mine. Suffice it to say, I reached the end
of my rope and, feeling like I had no other choice, I walked out. I
moved in with some friends in another town to house-sit for them
while they traveled and started putting on stupid seminars on how to
manage a body shop using a computer.

One day, I drove by a yard sale that had literally hundreds of boxes
of books in the front, side and back yards. They wanted 25 cents a
book. All of them were hardcover book club editions with DJs from
about 1950-1970. I love mysteries and most of them were mysteries so
I spent a good bit of time going through the boxes picking out the
ones I wanted. After a while, with the hot Texas sun beating down on
my back, the man on the porch said I was giving him a backache
watching me so if I’d give him $10, I could take them all. Now, I’m
fairly certain he didn’t really expect me to take them all, but I
did. Two trips in 3 vehicles by 3 people later, I was the owner of
about 3000 books. I had a booth in an antique mall so that’s where I
took the books. The booth wasn’t big enough, so I rented the building
next door and hung out my shingle. (Just to keep the time-line
straight, this was BOBS [Before Online Book Selling].

Shortly after that, my dentist and the friends whose house I was
house-sitting with talked to my husband who came to see me. And I am
sharing these personal issues with you because I am an extremely
lucky and blessed lady. In short, my husband sold the business, sold
the house and said it was time for him to stop being selfish about
living out his dream and he would now — for the rest of our lives —
help me fulfill my dreams. BOBS came along and I closed the
bookstore, we bought an old house in another town and “started over”.

Life is never simple so the new complication was a 2-story pier and
beam house built in 1920 with a fireplace in the middle and a lake
that formed underneath it every time it rained. By this time I had
amassed a lot more than 3000 books and that weight, coupled with the
fireplace and the “lake”, made us realize what we were doing wasn’t
going to work. Nor was the moisture good for the books. So a few
years ago I opened my 2nd bookstore.

I tell you all this to help illustrate a philosophy and support some
advice I’m going to give you. It is not just a cliche to say “life is
too short”. It is, indeed, a fact. Why did I wait until my father-in-
law got Alzheimer’s before I became unhappy about the road I chose in
life? Why did I think that road had to be the same road as my
husband’s? Was it a generational thing? Why did I not “get in touch”
with my own wants and desires? These are, of course, hypothetical
questions at this point and even though I may now know the answers, I
am so totally satisfied with my life as a whole — and so is my
husband, by the way — that my only regret is that I waited so long
in life to pursue my dreams.

I will never be able to advertise my bookstore as having been in
business for many years. My children will not be able to say they
were raised in a bookstore instead of a body shop (although my girls
are quite proud of that, having won some trophies with cars they
customized themselves, and my son continues the body shop business
today). I have more books than I could possibly catalog in the amount
of time I have left on earth if I never buy another book. Soon I
won’t be able to carry boxes of books from one end of the store to
another.

So no matter what you think the obstacles are, forget about them. If
it truly is a dream, don’t wait another day to put the wheels in
motion. Organize it all in your mind over the next 24 hours and go
browse some bookstores over the weekend. Look at the stacks, smell
the books and remember the first time you ever stepped foot in a
bookstore (that was NOT a Barnes & Noble or Waldenbooks, etc.). Go
back home and do some googling on how to handle books, repair books,
and identify books.

Another cliche: Do what you love and the money will follow. If it
doesn’t, that’s okay too, because you’ll be happy anyway.

Then just do it.