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This is what I was doing yesterday when the e-mail went out to the company announcing that I'd taken the Lead Visual Merchandiser position.

Making homemade little signs to hang in the windows of Burnside Powell's Building Two for their display on books about vacuum tubes and tube amps.

That font? That electric? That's how I felt.

Been thinking about when I first worked at Powell's, back when I worked part-time as a cashier and part-time running the Drama section in the Pearl Room. How I started taping local theater posters to the poles by the aisles full of books of plays. How those posters are still there.

Been thinking about before ... when I worked at the gelato shop across the street, 35 years old scooping ice cream with a group of sixteen-to-eighteen-year-olds, how I'd lean on the gelato counter and look through the windows and across the street to Powell's and wish I could work there.

Been thinking about before... when I'd just moved here. Seven years ago, living in my aunt Kathy's house, sitting for hours on her laptop, browsing jobs on Craig's List, never hearing back on applications, newly divorced with no job experience in the world but putting on clown makeup and losing my pants. How one afternoon, as I sat there tired and dejected, Kathy's computer with its talking clock announced, "It is one o'clock PM" and I burst into tears.