I’m glad to see that the Friends of the Socorro Library moved its monthly sale of used books into the decidedly un-used Zimmerly school library. Someone mentioned that it now looks like a real bookstore where you can browse around without bumping into another person browsing around. You never know what treasures you will find in there.

But I’ve always had an affinity for book stores, used or otherwise, and that even includes college book stores. I remember poking around the book store at New Mexico Tech one time looking for a refill to my Cross ballpoint pen. It’s been years since Socorro Office Supply next to the post office closed, and inasmuch as Walmart doesn’t stock Cross pens the Tech bookstore in Fidel was my last hope before resorting to online ordering.

Granted, it’s not like a Waldenbooks, Tower Books, B. Dalton, or Borders. As a matter of fact, nothing is, because all those big chains are closed down. There’s still a couple of Barnes and Nobles in Albuquerque, I think, but the rest – defunct, gone.

Now, you won’t find the latest bestsellers or even a dog-eared copy of Portnoy’s Complaint at the Tech bookstore but you can find lots of textbooks. Otherwise, you can buy all kinds of supplies, you name it: notebooks, pencils, pens, sweatshirts, and you never know when you’re going to need a protractor. But no Cross pen refills. The guy behind the counter said he could put in an order for me, and we got to talking about how everything is disposable, like refills. “No,” he said. “Nowadays they expect you to buy a whole new pen.”

Such it is in our George Jetson world. Although I’m pretty good at accepting change, as the Beach Boys sing, “I just wasn’t made for these times.” I sometimes think I was born in the wrong era. More lately, I find myself gravitating toward stuff that was in vogue in my parents’ time, way before I was born; jive music of Benny Goodman or Louis Prima and movies with W.C. Fields or the Marx Brothers.

I was reading an article that had to do with how nostalgia is so popular that it’s now part of our present. You’ve got kitsch from the 60s and 70s, retro furniture or steampunk anything. And it seems like half the movies coming out are either set in those decades or use music anywhere from the sixties through the eighties. In other words, what’s old is new again.

Except for maybe zoot suits.

I was listening to one of my old 45s on this little record player I bought because I foolishly got rid of my record changer back in 1995. Do you ever get a song stuck in your head? Like a brain itch you have to scratch by actually playing the record again? It was Bo Diddley’s You Can’t Judge a Book by Its Cover. He sings:

You can’t judge an apple by looking at a tree

You can’t judge honey by looking at the bee

You can’t judge a daughter by looking at the mother

You can’t judge a book by looking at the cover

Appearances can be deceiving, I suppose…and so can the past.

Speaking of which, there’s something I’ve been reading about called “Dad jeans” and “Dad clothes,” the latest way the younger folk poke fun at those of us a generation or two older. Remember, this is on the internet so it must be true. For example, to twenty-somethings, only Dads wear Gold Toe socks, and only Dads perch their sunglasses on their hats, and only Dads wear Polo shirts buttoned to the top. And on and on.

Of course, all that is not entirely true; it’s just all in fun. I reckon it’s their way of identifying themselves as being different from their parents. We all did that, I suppose; ridicule our parents’ fashion sense, I mean, although it was probably the other way around when college students were wearing love beads, headbands and ungodly huge bell bottoms.

Of course, times change and I wonder if back in the pioneer days when families were hacking their way through the Cumberland Gap to find good bottomland to plow, kids were making fun of the clothes their fathers wore (“dad, tri-cornered hats went out with pantaloons.”) Or in the caveman days a teenage Neanderthal girl would tell her mother, “oh mom, your hairstyle is sooo 99,999 BC.”

Yes, I admit these kinds of thoughts run through my head.

When it comes to being stylish, as far as I’m concerned blue suede shoes and Beatle boots should never go out of style; coonskin caps maybe, but not those.

And jeans will never go out of style, just please make mine ‘stretch.’

John Larson, El Defensor Chieftain