One more thing about August

One thing I forgot to mention in my post about how busy August was, is that we closed Hanks.

I know that seems like a big thing to forget to mention, but really… all I did was get emails from Sharon occasionally asking how much I wanted to mark stuff down to. All the stock was at her house, so it’s not like I had to do anything to mail out the purchases. Discounts had been going on since we made the announcement in June; we slowly marked everything down until it stopped moving, and then we marked everything down again, and so on. We hadn’t had any sales in a couple weeks, so we marked everything down to 75% off and fucked if it didn’t all sell in like three hours!

It’s sort of… is anti-climactic the right word? I mean, I was more sorry to see it go before we closed the actual bricks and mortar shop — I was sorrier to see it going before we even told people, back when we hardly had any stock on the shelves and nobody seemed to notice. That was sad. This is more like … like when our 16-year old demented cat was sleeping in her own poop, and we called Dr. Camp to come put her to sleep. More relief, really, than anything else. Now I can stop internally rolling my eyes when people ask me when the three of us will open up another storefront. (To be fair, those people are most often former casual shoppers – not the folks who spent a lot of time there and have become friends, who realize that the three of us have moved on.)

I feel like some people are going to want me to write something here about how deeply moved I am, how saddened I am by the closing, maybe rend my garments a little… but I just don’t feel it. Please feel free to rend your own garments, if you like. I feel like I already said everything that needed to be said, and then I said more, and now anything else is just going to be grief porn, picking at scabs. I don’t feel now is the time for sadness; now is the time to move on.

Or maybe I just don’t feel bad because I’ve got the best part of Hanks in my heart, and the best people from Hanks are now some of my very closest friends. So what am I missing? Besides the cute boys from the pizza place coming in to check on us and seeing if we’re hungry and want a slice? Not a lot, really. Not a lot.