The End of an Era

I found out as I left Brook Mays yesterday that this would be my final time to teach there, as the store is closing on Sunday. Everyone has known this day was coming for quite some time, since the company was sold out of bankruptcy to a liquidator back in August (my earlier thoughts on the subject are here), but it was still a little weird to walk out of there yesterday evening knowing that I would not be doing so next week.

As i said in the earlier post, I've been a part of the Plano store since May of 1992; it started out as what was supposed to be a summer job in the print music department, but, even as that job continued, it grew into an additional teaching venue that both paid more than the schools do and allowed me the chance to work with some good students from other districts who wouldn't have crossed paths with me otherwise. The place has been getting emptier as the weeks have gone by, and by the time I was there yesterday, almost an entire half of the store was vacant; it reminded me of the day we moved back into the building on Labor Day of '94 (we had been in temporary quarters since a fire in June of '93). The circle of life, as they say...

Later on in the week, I'll compile a post about all the funny stuff that customers said when they called the store with questions; I always said I could write a book about that, so a blog post should be fairly effortless.

A walk along the mean (and green) streets: A dog that disappeared from his family's California home last month has finally been found...all the way over here, in Denton. They found him because he had one of those microchips implanted in his neck containing his owners' information.