As you may know, I am the authorized biographer of the bookseller John Heartbreak. I am currently working on the 3rd – and final volume, which hits the stands just in time for the upcoming Christmas shopping season. Heartbreak, as you may also know, has spent the last 25 years staring out a window overlooking the Berryville Square in a state of existential cafard. It has been my job to study, organize, and report this life.
The life and times of a bookseller in Berryville, Arkansas, possibly strikes you as a subject of limited appeal. I admit that Heartbreak poses certain challenges for the biographer. He is an urban creature living in a small town. He is deaf and incapable of contributing to, or even following, the 40 minutes long conversations that occur daily – and are repeated over and over again along the gossip chain – about, oh say, the time Pisser Leach had a flat tire in Blue Eye, Missouri. Then there’s his unceasing staring out the window, his withering cafard. Yet, within the category of “bookseller/deaf/Berryville, Arkansas” the Heartbreak series tops the charts.
Volume 3 is tentatively titled, John Heartbreak’s Coffee is Cold, intimating that the end is nigh for both subject and biographer. I have enjoyed knowing Heartbreak, and writing about him. And I am happy to report that he has cheered up a bit, due largely to his becoming a pedestrian with the goal of walking every street and road within the city limits. So far, Heartbreak has discovered Mill Creek Park, a 200-yard riparian masterpiece home to a pair of otters, and a number of charming neighborhoods undiscovered by drivers stuck on highways to-and-fro.
While Berryville – and basically all of Arkansas – is comprised of a plurality of stable geniuses who will surely make Sarah Huckabee Sanders its next governor, Berryville itself may be the state’s best managed city, and it has been a pleasure to watch it prosper, grow in size and diversity, and see its investments in both people and infrastructure.
On that note, let me say goodbye. This is my last column. So long, and thanks for all the fish.