A Day Downtown

Downtown Mesa, Arizona, is reminiscent of many small towns with a couple of large churches, a park, and interesting shops lining the sidewalks. This charm doesn't open its arms to visitors until 10 a.m. and the sidewalks roll up at 5 p.m. shooing pedestrians home in time for dinner. While Mesa offers a monthly evening event with street corner bands and plenty of people, Monday afternoons pass lazily inviting visitors to wander aimlessly among antique shops, music stores, and trendy boutiques. Lulled by the January sunshine of central Arizona - which is a meek 75 degrees this time of year - the guys and I sojourned to downtown for the day.

We spent a great deal of time playing guitars at the local music store, culling through stacks of records in an antique mall (which we left with four new 45's for our juke box), and meandering through an ancient bookstore which sports antique tables and Victorian-style chairs as display space for myriad leather-bound copies of classics ranging from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland to Crime and Punishment. The walls are lined floor-to-ceiling with millions of books - both new and used - on every subject imaginable. These library-style stacks continue along center sets of book cases and have built-in ladders to help customers reach the tallest shelves. The entire place smells of old paper and ink and is manned by a gruff-looking gentleman on a tall stool behind the counter opposite the door. Today, while Jeff browsed the music section, I looked at art books, and Jade went upstairs to thumb through the novels, where he met a man who said his mother went to school with Louis L'Amour. The man proceeded to talk about how L'Amour quit school when he was about my son's age and found odd jobs doing manual labor before he started writing. (This kind of thing happens to Jade frequently. In a department store at Christmas, he sat in an empty chair next to an older gentleman who regaled him with stories about fishing on Douglas Lake.) After a late lunch at an Italian cafe (which shut down around us at 3 p.m.), I browsed an interesting little boutique filled with embellished blue jeans and the latest jewelry while the guys visited a piano store to try out its wares.

Finally, we made our way back to the car and headed home for snacks, t.v. time, and ultimately the comfort of our beds since tomorrow is a school day all around. But we each felt a sense of contentment which comes from the slower pace of a small-town excursion.



This old bookstore has a library vibe.



 

The tree-lined streets and shaded sidewalks add to Mesa's small-town feel.

  

Sculpture adorns nearly every street corner downtown.



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