It doesn’t matter how old you are. It doesn’t matter what other people tell you.

If you can find some courage (in yourself) and some faith (in anything) and some perspective (it’s not that big a deal) and some kindness (always be the nicest person in the room) you can make things happen that will amaze people.

This is what I’ve learned from my mother. Not just in the past month, but my whole life. There’s a reason my people pay attention to “Auntie Kay.”

For years—perhaps decades—my dad would walk to the flagship Kroch’s and Brentano’s store on South Wabash on Chicago, spending his lunch hour among the famously knowledgeable booksellers and the then-amazing array of inventory. I only remember being in that downtown store once or twice, but the mall Kroch’s and Brentano’s in the town where I grew up was a key setting in my childhood love of reading.

We went to the mall almost every night. If I wasn’t scanning the skies for Soviet bombers or taping Top 40 songs off the boombox, I was likely one of three places: the Sears arcade, the mall food court, or the little mall bookstores.

My parents would buy McDonald’s coffee and smoke in the food court, while I would itch for the trip to Kroch’s and Brentano’s or B. Dalton to check for a new Choose Your Own Adventure, Be An Interplanetary Spy, Star Wars, or Dragonlance books.

It was part of every trip to the mall, usually Dalton’s first; then Kroch’s. In Kroch’s, I would stand in the role-playing game aisle while my dad went on his appointed rounds through the store. That is where I fell in love with Star Trek and the Dungeon Master Guide. It’s where I first tried to pronounce the name Cthulthu, and where I discovered the existence of dice with more than six sides.

When I was old enough to start braving the mall on my own, it was always Kroch’s and Brentano’s where I would meet up with my parents after my private adventures at Kaleidoscope or Babbage’s or Musicland.

Today I still have occasion to go to that same mall every once in awhile. Those stores are gone, but a large Barnes and Noble—ten times larger and a thousand times “nicer” than either of those relics—is an anchor store at one end of the mall. I go there with my own wife and children, and we too always seem to end up meeting at the bookstore; however, I almost never buy anything other than a cup of incorrectly prepared coffee.

From a retail standpoint, the old mall bookstores were not Super Destinations for a book lover in the way that Barnes & Noble or Border’s have tried to be. But they were destinations just the same.

Turns out it is the books, not the store that create the destination. And as the chains have relied more and more on straight-up recommendations from Ingram reps or whoever waters down the New & Notable table to the lowest common denominator, they have lost sight of that which always made their stores most interesting: the discovery of new and intriguing works.

Today my book purchases almost always happen over the Internet or via my Kindle’s WhisperSync. My own experience of that joy of discovery has been left to scans of blog posts, friends’ recommendations, Twitter crowdsourcing or a monthly ritual with Locus magazine.

With this news that Borders is closing 200 Waldenbooks in malls nationwide, I remember again the little mall chains that paved the way for today’s failing superstores, preceding them both in lease and in failure.

I’m not smart enough to know what will save publishing, or the book trade, but I am wise enough to mourn the passing of bookstores that are actually about books and reading rather than a merchandising consultant’s platonic ideal of same.

Wandering a bookstore has been a Morrow-male tradition, a pastime well suited for the bookish, friendly, and affably antisocial men we seem to produce. We are comfortable with ideas, with solitude. Today, though, you’re more likely to find us wandering the intertubes than a bookstore.

Sometimes that makes me sad.

What are your bookstore memories?

Elsewhere: The death of mall bookstores and the death of publishing

I attended a little liberal arts college in Wisconsin, where we well-off kids were dipped into a fantasy island of hippie liberalism in the middle of a devastated post-industrial blue-collar town. We had to stick together or intoxicate ourselves out of our minds to keep the consensual reality held together, and generally it worked pretty well.

I’ll assume there are plenty of inside jokes and camaraderie at your alma mater. But I had no idea what a funny little cult that Beloit College comprised until a few weeks ago, when someone created a wonderful variation on one of those horrible “give a rotting carcass to your friends” Facebook applications.

This thing exploded and just about every single status update I’ve seen on my wall for two weeks has consisted of my college friends sending random Beloit memories to each other. I’m sure it is driving non-Beloiters insane, but I can’t stop smiling for all the obscure memories evoked.

The best part to me is that it’s so different from all the plants and sweets and beers and other useless bullshit that people send me on FB, because it really is a memory that you give and receive.
Someone says to you, “yes it’s a cliche that we made a late-night run down the hill to Super Gas to buy smokes” [for under $2 a pack, I might add] “but I remember that time we went and that we used to call it Stop-and-Die.”

Or that “I remember going to dinner at Imperial Palace with you, because it was one of like three restaurants in town so we had no choice, but jesus we had some good times, hunh.”

This application tapped straight into the vein of what can make Facebook great. All of a sudden a bunch of reunited former friends and acquaintances get to gush and reminisce about all the stuff you never would have noticed without decades of perspective.

It reminded me of some really great times in my life, things and details that would have been buried with me, and allowed me to share them with the same people I first experienced them with.

Now that’s social media.

My daughter claims she wants to be an artist, and decided (all on her own) that she wanted to create a museum featuring her favorite "cruisers" (her word for art projects) that she had made in the past year.

So she went through the archives, selected a bunch of her favorites, and we decided to take the idea seriously. We all dressed for the occasion, hung the art in the living room, invited Grandma and Grandpa Morrow, served appetizers and champagne, etc.

It was a full weekend project, but we all had a blast.

She was so proud of herself.

Not to pat ourselves on the back, but here’s the thing I learned: if you have kids, and they are enthusiastic about something (anything), take the time and effort to really honor it.

It wasn’t convenient, and it wasn’t my first choice of how to spend last weekend, but it made my daughter absolutely shine with pride, and her interest in “being an artist” has grown even brighter.

And if you don’t have kids, what are you enthusiastic about? What can you make the time to honor for yourself? What’s your museum?

PS—I decided to try Animoto to make a quick montage of some of the pictures. It’s too short (you only get 30 seconds for free), but kinda nifty.

On the surface, today has been just a terrible day. Many minor disappointments, some Very Bad News for a friend, a farewell to one of the great leaders of my company. And it’s fucking cold.

Sadness aplenty.

But then I got home.

And my daughter showed me one of her school projects.

And then I opened the mail, which contained this wonderful shirt from Iron and Twine.

And I feel better.

The seven things meme, as rendered by yours truly (@mikemorrow). Not really all that interesting—this is definitely harder than I thought, but I also didn’t want to spend too much time agonizing over what to say.

Stick around here long enough and you’ll get to know me better, I’m sure.

Not that I was asking for it (thanks @frageelay).

1. I have absolutely no fear of speaking in front of groups or crowds, but one-on-one conversations tend to paralyze me with anyone but my closest friends. Hence my fondness for Twitter.

2. I’m a Deadhead. As in, I used to go to shows and even still listen to the music Deadhead. As in, I just paid waaay too much money for tickets to the new Spring Tour Deadhead. Actually, I love improvisational music of all kinds.

3. At the same time I hold a deep love for really rigidly orchestrated, almost mathematical music. During the same peiod I was going to Dead shows, I also saw Rush in three cities in the same week. Rush! Pretty much the antithetical live experience to the Dead. I guess I love it all.

4. I am a direct descendent of Jeremiah Morrow, 9th Governor of Ohio, Ohio’s first member of the House of Representatives, and namesake of Morrow County. That’s where any connection to fame ends, though I did once have a conversation with Allen Ginsberg.

5. I turned down a job in 1996 from a start-up search engine that wanted to become a “human index” of the web. They were going to pay me to surf the web (such as it was then) and categorize the pages I found. Did I mention I TURNED THIS JOB DOWN? Although looking back it seems like the ideal dream job, that refusal started me on the direct path toward the job where I met my wife. I think the company was called C-Box? A quick Google turns up squat.

6. Speaking of The Mrs, my wife and I dated secretly for a year-and-a-half. We worked together at a tiny little consulting firm that required nearly every ounce of our being, and to keep things real we did everything we could to keep our relationship apart from that weird, weird place. I have a lot more to tell you about that job someday.

7. When I was an adolescent, my grandmother predicted that I would marry a woman named Jennifer—a fact which I completely forgot about until after I proposed to my wife, Jennifer.

And so it goes.

In the middle of a cul de sac in the town where we used to live is a little island of grass and a single, nondescript street lamp that holds the stature of myth in our family.

I speak of The Green Light.

The Green Light, so named and mythologized by my daughter at two years of age, cast a peculiar green shade from its vantage point at the end of our street. I’m sure that with a little while of dedicated Googling I could determine the reason this light cast such a verdant hue, though as you’ll see I’m not so interested in the light itself as what it represents and how it came to embed itself in the young imagination of a family just getting its feet underneath itself.

My daughter discovered it. Of course, it was always there, flicking on automatically at dusk and shutting itself off at dawn. But neither my wife nor I ever paid it any attention until it had captured our daughter’s imagination a way that very little else had before it.

My daughter G was captivated by it, and how different it was from the more pedestrian (ahem) light in front of our own home. She noticed it, in the way that a two-year-old notices things: with the realization that something out of the ordinary can transport us into a different world altogether.

“It’s The Green Light!” G would exclaim as we drove home, or left the front door, each time like a bolt of recognition that a long-lost friend had made the visit from far away.

We would drive past our house and drive ’round the cul de sac to visit it, sometimes multiple times, to satisfy G’s desire to see it. If the weather cooperated, when I got home from work we would walk together to pay it a visit. On more than one occasion, G would hug the stone lamppost. And on every occasion we would flirt with a tantrum at the prospect of being forced to leave its presence. The light had a personality, a life beyond our visits, and was the topic of toddler conversations and imaginings.

Who cares?

It was the first instance we witnessed of my daughter noticing something in the outside world and internalizing it into her vision of the universe. It was different, and so was special, and had nothing to do with her parents.

I desperately wished I had thought to document some of the tales that G told us about The Green Light; the specifics of the stories are lost. But if you ask G today, she still remembers it (as “part of the Old House").

It has worked its way back into my consciousness—in part because my son is now approaching that magical age of discovery, and in part because I’ve spent a great deal of time lately thinking about where we anchor our creative energies.

This lamppost in a far north Chicago suburb became a totem for a little imagination, the source of focus for a mind teeming with ideas and hungry for explanations.

A mind not all that different from the more grown-up ones that you and I try daily to “manage” or “control” or “organize.”

We each tend to cluster our creative energies on something, and usually the brightest or shiniest or most immediately appealing.

We need a beacon.

For my daughter, it used to be The Green Light (and is now replaced by her various “kids” and fairies and art projects). For you or I, it might be our Work, or a Blog, or a Person. It may be a healthy focus, or it may not be so positive right now. But I think there must be value in recognizing It for what It is and looking deeper into how it informs your worldview.

And of course we can’t miss the symbolism of a Green Light meaning “GO,” can we?

So what’s your Green Light, and where is it telling you to go?

What you’re looking at here is one of the most important artifacts of my life. I have had it with me as long as I’ve lived on my own, and even while it languished in a box in my parents’ basement it was never forgotten.

It’s a classic scenario, probably as common today as it was thirtyish years ago—at the end of the school year the teacher handed out awards to every student. Mrs. G gave out the usual awards—class clown, best smile, most helpful—but she also made some bold predictions.

And in mine, she changed my life.

I received the “Future Author Award” that Spring day, and from that day forward whenever anyone asked me the perennial and horrid question “what do you want to be when you grow up,” I answered without hesitation: “author.”

(Astronaut remained a very popular answer, but I knew deep inside I would write stories long before I would ever leave Earth.)

I’m sure my parents had impressed the idea upon me at some point early on. They still talk about the “amazing” stories I would tell them while I took my bath (apparently a family tradition; my own daughter delivers some pretty wonderful narratives during her own bath times), and we lived in a house full of books. Sure, it would have happened in any case.

But the Future Author Award made it real.

Of course I would write books (or ads, or marketing brochures, or essays, or a blog). I had a blue ribbon that made it so.

I wish I could remember why Mrs. G had such confidence in my literary future; the reason for her prophecy is lost to my memory. But I’ve never forgotten the gesture. There’s a part of me that wants to do everything I can to make sure I don’t let that faith be misplaced, and to fulfill the destiny that was given me in a partitioned classroom on the last day of school.

I wonder if anyone else from that class has kept theirs, or if it means as much to them as mine does to me.