The bookstore I worked at during grad school had a fairly limited set of CDs it would cycle through the speaker system. (It got even more limited when the manager was going through her Nora Jones phase and played that first big-hit CD on continuous repeat for a few weeks.) It was generally soft and melodic music with instruments in the foreground and new-age-y undertones in the background, and we all got very very familiar with the sound-track to our working lives.

And working at the bookstore wasn’t all unicorns and rainbows, though a lot of it was very peaceful. Our manager was a controlling pathological liar, just for instance. And the Christmas season was more about adrenalin than peace. And we made basically no money at all. But there were also long stretches of time spent shelving, unshelving, and generally moving around book after book after book, often in relative solitude.

10 years later, I sometimes hear these CDs when I go in for my weekly massage. And you’d think that hearing music so strongly associated with work that I can practically smell the carpet and shelves would disrupt the calm of a massage. But as it turns out, the overwhelming memory is of shelving book after book after book in the dim solitude of back corners of the bookstore. And it turns out that this is a very soothing memory indeed.

I think I remember the day very clearly, but I was five, so who really knows. In my head, though, the events are crystal clear. My parents had been closeted in their bedroom/study all day. They did this once a month when they balanced their books, writing out sums of money carefully on ledger paper in a big binder and balancing each section of the binder precisely. I remember being increasingly upset as the frustration levels rose this month. Somewhere between the ledger sheet marked “cash” and the ledger sheet marked “miscellaneous expenses” they’d lost ten cents, and they were both hunting up receipts, reading off amounts from the two sheets to each other line by line, and generally working very hard to find those 10 cents.

I knew money was important. We didn’t buy candy at the check-out counter because it was too expensive. We walked a lot because cars were expensive. We didn’t put much jam on our bread because jam was expensive. We didn’t buy ice cream cones because they cost the same as a quart of ice cream — a quart isn’t nearly as fun as a cone, but it didn’t make sense to buy one person ice cream when we could have bought enough for all of us. Not that I ever thought we lacked for anything. I just knew that we thought very carefully before spending any money at all, and that at the end of the month meals got rather odd as Mom stretched our supplies to last through until the beginning of the next month, when we would finally go stock up at the grocery store again. (I remember asking many times what difference it made when we went to the store, out of curiosity rather than want, and I never did quite understand the answers, but that’s another story.)

So I knew these ten cents were probably very important, and I was sad that they were getting so frustrated, and I worried that something bad would happen if they couldn’t find those ten cents. So finally I climbed up on a chair and opened the little blue-green china tea pot I used as a piggy bank. Sure enough, I had a dime in there. So I took it in to my parents and gave them the ten cents they needed.

I’m pretty sure that this didn’t solve their problems — looking back, the problem was mis-matched ledgers more than it was a lack of ten cents. But that’s the day my parents decided I should get an allowance. Twenty-five cents every single Sunday for the next several years, mine to save up in my little tea pot until I found something I wanted to buy.

“Over 30 Rides and Attractions” will now be a Costco, or so said NPR as it was coaxing me into wakefulness this morning.

I don’t normally wake up to news of places I haunted as a kid, so it took me a minute to realize that they really did mean my Kiddieland from the days when I lived in a Chicago suburb. This is the Kiddieland where, one rainy day, all the rides but the log ride were closed and all the other park visitors had gone home, so my siblings and friends and I road that log ride on continuous loop for what felt like hours. By the time we’d had enough, we were best friends with the ride operator.

Looking back, I wonder if he resented not being able to go home, kept there by a bunch of kids giddy with the idea of having the park to themselves.

I wonder if they’ll put a log ride into the Costco. The Mall of America could give them some pointers.

The Sunday morning liturgy was a comfortable and yet baffling thing when I was five or six. I couldn’t remember a time when I hadn’t known it by heart.

Today I can’t remember a time when I chose to color rather than imitate the grown-ups as they worshipped, though I assume that my younger siblings weren’t the first in the family to have little bags with crayons and scratch paper, weren’t the first to snatch up copies of the children’s bulletin and have to weigh the relative merits of finishing the coloring pages as soon as the family sat down or to wait for the interminable sermon to get underway.

Imitation often prompted long serious ponderings on the way home, though, since there were a couple of pieces of the liturgy that I couldn’t reconcile with sound theology. I couldn’t figure out, for example, why we sang “God rest ye Mary, gentlemen.” Perhaps this was a mis-categorized epiphany piece and then the wise men could be the gentlemen that were there with Mary. There were also shepherds around, though I wouldn’t have thought of them as gentlemen. Still, maybe they’d earned that rise in status due to their proximity to Jesus’ birth. (Years later, when I could finally read well and fast enough to do so while singing along, “merry gentlemen” made everything so much clearer.)

I also developed a complicated theology based on a line from the confession of sins. I puzzled and puzzled over my weekly pronouncement, “But I am hardly sorry for them, and sincerely repent of them.” Why, why why would I tell God that I wasn’t sorry for these sins? Any kid knows that the first thing you do is say you’re really sorry for whatever-it-is you’d done. That’s how you get forgiven.

Then I figured it out. Since God could see what I was thinking, he’d know if I wasn’t sorry enough, so the best course of action was to be brutally honest. Moreover, I was pretty sure people could never be sorry enough for their sins, so this was a good default statement.

After sincerely confessing my lack of ability to repent sincerely for many years, I finally read the actual printed words and was rather disappointed to find that we’d been sugar-coating things all along after all. “Heartily” is quite different from “hardly.”