OH, GOODY!

On the wall in the coffee room at the Sylvia Beach Hotel in Newport, WA, hangs a three by three foot display in a simple black frame filled with squares, each square representing two letters of the alphabet. It’s titled “Fictional Character Alphabet Chart—Egads!” When S intersects with F, the character in the square is Scout Finch from “To Kill a Mockingbird”.  When J meets E, we have Jane Eyre. Since there are 676 squares, many characters are obscure. The T and L square, for instance, is filled by Taduz Lemke, a gypsy in Stephen King’s “Thinner”. It is a massive project and impresses me to no end.

People who frequent the hotel know that Goody, the owner, made the chart. Goody is a character herself, who lives in Portland where she also owns the Rimsky Korsakoffee Shop. She named The Sylvia Beach for an ex-pat who ran a bookstore in Paris in the early nineteen hundreds. The hotel attracts book lovers, writers, and slightly strange folks who like staying in slightly funky rooms named and decorated for authors. I’ve stayed in Jane Austen, Ernest Hemingway, Dr. Suess, Robert Louis Stevenson, Amy Tan, Agatha Christie, Emily Dickinson, Tennessee Williams, and Edgar Allen Poe (no longer available, probably because the pendulum in the ceiling over the bed and the thumping telltale heart under the bed, gave guests the heebie jeebies).

When Ed and I met Goody two years ago in the coffee room at the Sylvia Beach, we didn’t know she was the owner. We saw only a short, intense-looking woman with a mane of grey hair whose face lit up like a little girl’s when she looked up from her Scrabble board and said, “Will you play with me?” She proceeded to beat our butts, delighted as a child when she got a letter that upped her game. Her passion for words and writers and books delighted me.

We hoped to see Goody on my birthday trip this year. We stayed in F. Scott Fitzgerald, read Bernice Bobs her Hair, one of Fitzgerald’s short stories, and had serious fun discussing it, reminding me how much I love being married to a former English major. We hung out in the third floor “Library”, also Goody’s creation, where guests sprawl in chairs and on couches, reading, writing, and dozing, looking out windows at the wind blown sands of Nye Beach, watching foamy white tides break in the swath of stunning blue ocean under a lighter blue sky where gulls swooped alongside brightly colored kites flown by children of every age. We agreed that the scene looked like a B grade movie set in the best sense.

But Goody didn’t show. So, to keep her fresh in mind, in the hotel’s family style dining room, Ed and I told our breakfast companions about how she knocked our Scrabble socks off, and about the other, “bigger” game she was playing when we met her.

Goody was, she told us, “Living the Alphabet”. She allotted two weeks to each letter, and, during that time, she ate, slept and breathed it. So, when her letter was “C”, she’d Cruise to the Corner in her Car, get out and dance the Cha Cha while drinking a Coke, and then Crush the Can before she got back in the Car and Cruised home where she’d listen to Choral music while eating Canned Corn and Chicken.

Crazy? You betcha. Do I envy her? Oh yeah. And I’m practicing. When I sit at my computer to write, instead of dreading the impossible task of getting it perfect, I remind myself how cool it is to Live Life with a passion for words and the messages they convey. I’m gonna play now, I tell myself. I get to do this. I really do. Oh, Goody!

#