A Bookstore for Laredo

The day before B. Dalton, then Laredo's only bookstore, closed, my dad said to me, “I don’t want to hear about your dreams; I want to hear about your plans.”

If you didn’t know him, if you didn’t know me, if you didn’t hear the self-aware laugh in his voice and the teasing tone in mine, his words would sound harsh. After all, what father wouldn’t want to hear about his daughter’s dreams? His oldest child’s dreams?

The truth is, both my dad and my mom have always been wonderfully receptive to, and unimaginably supportive of, their children’s dreams. But my parents are more than listening ears. They are hard workers. Build-from-the-ground-uppers. Entrepreneurs. Inspired and inspiring. I have learned from them what it means to not only dream, but to plan. And to not only plan, but to put that plan into action.

So I understood what my dad meant. I laughed and said, “I think I take after you.” I had recently dreamed about how I hadn’t been so supportive of my husband Colin's latest idea for work. Perhaps the dream was my subconscious telling me to stop, for a moment, playing devil’s advocate. Stop picking apart, examining each word, the syntax of each sentence, the format of each page, and the overall idea long enough to consider the excitement behind the idea. The inspiration. But I suppose I, too, like a plan.

And, yet, I’m not a planner. It’s a big joke in my family, how little of a planner I am. I oversleep, press snooze every seven minutes for two hours, am rarely the first to arrive at an appointment, am often forgetful, and put, maybe, too little effort into amending these qualities. Okay, these flaws.

What I am, however, is a person to whom “No” means very little. Or, rather, it means a lot. It means I will work and fight and sweat (then hide that sweat under a deceptive layer of Laura Mercier mineral powder foundation) all the harder to prove that I can meet that original goal. I can prove that naysayer wrong. I can make that beautiful, effervescent dream an equally beautiful, if imperfect, reality. And, in fact, I can do even better than I first imagined.

My dream: to open Laredo Texas’s first bookstore since the closing of its only one. My border hometown, with a population of 250,000 (and a population of 600,000 just a few steps away in Mexico), is now the largest city in the U.S. without a single bookstore. The 1,200 square-foot B. Dalton, owned by Barnes and Noble, was recently closed as part of the company’s transition to “large format” bookstores. The closing was covered by such media as MSNBC, National Public Radio, and The Wall Street Journal, which irresponsibly (in my opinion) dubbed Laredo “a poor city filled with immigrants who don’t speak English, let alone read it.”

The sting of such criticism follows closely on the heels of media reports denouncing Laredo as a breeding ground for criminal activity—drug and gang violence galore. The largest import/export hub in the U.S., Laredo, Texas is the nation’s bad joke, its bastard stepchild. That’s fine. It will allow us to do something great—something customized for Laredo’s unique culture and community, which is so much more than recent publicity would suggest. One year from now, I hope to watch as ground breaks and gives way to our bookstore. I hope to cheer as that dry South Texas soil splits to allow room for books. Stories. Worlds.

My plan: to research. To learn everything I can about selling books (as opposed to writing, editing, or publishing them). That includes financial dynamics, merchandising, location, store design, demographics, inventory, computerization, human resources, marketing, operations, and the list goes on. To write (and have reviewed) an educated, thorough, creative business plan, entirely tailored to the Laredo market. To apply for grants and fellowships. To apply for a small business loan. To encourage community support. To purchase land. To design and build. And to perform the real work—everything that comes after Laredo’s bookstore opens.

I hope to be a part of raising the literacy rate in my hometown (currently 47% of adults in Webb County lack basic reading skills). I hope to give children and teenagers a safe place to explore themselves, and the world. I hope to give adults a warm, welcoming place to enjoy one another’s company, to sit down with a good book and perhaps enjoy a glass of wine. In short, I hope to offer my city both an escape and a return. A liftoff.

One year. We can do this. And here, I will record the progress. I hope you will join me.

Dreams. Plans. Inspiration. They’re all we need to achieve great things.