Selling My Books on the Streets of Brooklyn 8/23

I was leaning against a silver Acura that had parked beside the floating bookshop. I felt the car move and assumed the driver was about to enter. I expected him to berate me. To my surprise, no one was there when I turned. I figured a truck or speeding car had caused a vibration while I was day dreaming. A few minutes later a Russian gentleman who greets me with a fist bump and kind words each day said the shelves in Monica's Pharmacy had been shaking. He was sure it was an earthquake. I noticed people gathered in front of an eyeglass shop across the street, talking animatedly. A while later a young woman speaking into her cell phone as she passed, said: "Y'all didn't feel it?" An older woman who spends a few hours each afternoon in the library said the unoccupied chairs had moved. Dave, who has donated many books to me, said his whole building shook. He'd assumed it was a gas explosion. Tyra, a teacher whose apartment is on the floor below mine, said one of her wall fixtures moved like a pendulum. Later, I asked two of the staff in CVS if anything had fallen off the shelves. The manager said he hadn't even felt the tremor, the stockman said everything shook but nothing fell. Frankie, our building's stellar porter, was outside with his shopping cart and felt nothing. I turned on the radio as soon as I got home and was surprised to hear the quake had occurred hundreds of miles away, in Virginia. I had never felt one in Brooklyn. We have them, supposedly, but they are too slight to be noticed. My friend Dominick moved to L.A. the summer of '67. A few years later he was driving on a highway, pre-dawn, and saw the lights in the entire San Fernando Valley go out at once. In a letter to me he said he first thought an atomic bomb had exploded. We got a tiny taste of that today in the Northeast. Who'da thunk it? as we say in Brooklyn.
Thanks to my man Kofi, who continues to support me, buying Wonders of the Natural World, a beautiful pictorial, and to the two women doing God's work, escorting a group of handicapped adults, who bought several books each, and to Susan, my most faithful regular, whose elderly companion purchased a book on eating right for her. She gained two pounds recently, although it doesn't show. I guess the reason she is so slim is because she is so conscious of her weight.
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