Good books, like true friends, can be hard to find. When you locate both, you wanna hang on to them. On a recent visit to Auckland, a Kiwi writer with paternal roots in Lautoka Tulia Thompson leads me to Hard to Find, a two-storey house in Onehunga with rooms and rooms filled with used books galore. Each tome tells several stories: there’s the one that the authors intended but contained within the yellowed, dogeared pages and musty smells are also stories of previous owners and other lives.
Tulia recommends Potiki by the Maori author Patricia Grace. I forget to get her to inscribe it for me. We met by chance two years ago in a Suva café, she was researching a book, I was not minding my own business. Now, we find ourselves back together in the same place again for a little while.
We reconnect. We talk books and writing and love and family and life. Small talk has never been my strong suit. I’m happy when I meet others with the same problem.
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I find myself back in Auckland after a lapse of 21 years. When I was last here, I was a skinny, pimple-faced teenager finishing high school in Waitakere. Give or take a few pounds, two decades and clearer skin, little else seems to have changed. Sure, I’m older (and hopefully a little wiser) but inside don’t we all feel the same? I could say the same of Auckland. In a good way, it feels unchanged.
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