Bookstore Daydreams: It’s All About Location, Location, Location

As you probably know, my current Big Picture fantasy is to someday open my own bookstore. It’s on my 101 Things list, and it’s my mental Happy Place when work or family or The Boy is driving me nuts. I picture walking past the shelves of books, the comfy seating areas, the big display tables laden with books I love. I think about the things I’ll do to make reading exciting to others. If you’re talking to me and I seem out of it, that’s where I am, in my Bookstore Daydreams.

I’ve started, barely, to look into what it would take to make this a reality, and it is daunting, amazing really, how actual people, not corporations or franchises or conglomerates, become business owners. There is so much to do and learn and plan for, so much money to be saved up or gotten (somehow), so many things to think about.

I know I’m not anywhere near the stage of starting a small business. As someone who wants to open a brick-and-mortar store, not just sell my wares on the Interwebs, I know there are a lot of hurdles to jump, messy seas to navigate.

Which is why I like to dream. One of the things I like to imagine is where this Bookstore Daydream might someday live, in the real world of Long Beach, CA. So you won’t believe what I found the other week as I was out on one of my long perambulations around my neighborhood.

Long Beach Digs: Southeast Farmers Market

Gorgeous fruits and veggies + Southern California sunshine + handmade tamales = the Southeast Farmers Market, held every Sunday from 9:00AM to 2:00PM in Alamitos Bay Marina, a place near and dear to my heart, so dear in fact that almost every Sunday since we’ve moved to Long Beach, I haul myself out of bed, suit up in my most comfy of comfies, strap on my Guatemalan “shopping purse” and motor on over.

I mean, I love a good farmers market just as much as the next Toms-wearing boho hippie, but honest to god homemade tamales?? And hand-mixed strawberry lemonade?? Hello – get outta my way! In exchange for five of your measly dollars (I can’t get a grande Starbucks mocha in NYC for that little), the lovely man at Me Gusta Tamales will graciously spoon green and red salsa over your piping hot pork tamale (the only way I roll) and expertly eyeball-mix the most perfect blend of homemade lemonade and strawberry juice. If this guy set up shop any closer to my house, I’d be 300 pounds by now.

dude! you and your man purse – outta my way! i need a tamale!