2003-07-10 - 11:50 p.m.

I guess there really isn�t a whole lot I can say. She�s the best boss I�ve ever had. Told you what was expected and then disappeared. Not afraid to pitch in with all the little busy work, and she lived for the books she was surrounded by.

So when I got a call from Linda this afternoon saying that our boss, Ginny Williams, died this morning, it totally blindsided me.

You know when you get bad news and your diaphragm does that thing where it automatically contracts and you take in a sharp, deep breath? I did that.

In the split second it took me to take in that breath, a dozen things shot through my head.

-Medical history: She recently had a knee replacement, could be a thrombus. Chain smoker, history of several medical conditions and medications she�s on.

-Take bilateral blood pressures.

-Possible heart attack.

-Get me 2 large bore IVs; normal saline.

-I want to see an EKG STAT.

-Draw a blood panel, the whole rainbow.

-Can we get a chest X-ray?

-Jesus Jarrad, you are nowhere near her. You�re not in the emergency room, you�re downtown.

-She�s been dead for hours.

-You can�t help her.

-What can you do?

-Help out the others. They�ll be upset.

�Do you guys need anything? Do you need me to come by and help out?�

And that�s all I could do. They had everything covered, they just wanted me to know.

It�ll be different working at the bookstore now. The people I work with and I form a team that works like a well oiled machine. We all know each other�s strengths and weaknesses, interests and foibles. Together, we have become one of the best bookstore teams that Waldenbooks has in this multi-state district. Ginny was the one that lead us to get there.

We won�t be lost without her, we�ll carry on and still work together wonderfully. But we won�t have the direction that we had before. The sense of the big picture that she always gave us.

Ginny was a wonderful woman. Highly educated, she was one of what some sociologists call �the middle-brow�, meaning that she wasn�t part of the high-brow society, but she had the intellect, education and focus that high-end academia is known for. A voracious reader, as any manager of a bookstore should be, she hated sitting around when there were things to do, books to read. She loved her children more than anything else in the world, and she left them a personal library large enough to rival some small public ones.

When a friend dies, everyone deals with it differently. And the way you deal with it is different for every death. For me, I�ll be thinking of her as I remember her in her finest.

The moment I remember her most for was a while ago. It was a slow morning, and we were at the moving game again.

She was wearing one of her vests. She hand made these beautiful vests that could easily have sold for hundreds of dollars at a high end clothing store, and we were moving the shelves around again. Ginny prided herself on her decorative abilities in the store. And you can tell the difference when you go into our store and another Waldenbooks, ours is just so much more comfortable. But this meant that she was rearranging the sections more often than most. I always laughed at this. I see the point of making your store look good, but I always figured our customers would like the consistency of knowing where to look for their books, a consistency they wouldn�t have if we kept changing the store on them. Her attitude was that if the customers were really going to get upset about rearranging the sections at the local bookstore, they needed to get a life anyway. So we spent that morning moving shelves around, chit chatting and catching up on what was going on with each other.

It was just a normal morning with Ginny, and a pleasant one at that, nothing special. But that�s how I�ll remember her, wearing her vests, laughing that cackling laugh of hers, and tipping the shelves over just enough to slide them across the carpet. She was a wonderful woman, deeply immersed in literature and life.

And she will be missed.

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