Marjorie Baker R.I.P.

My Horizon Bookshop was just a few years old. I needed help, someone to replace Noeline, my first assistant and employee. I had numerous applicants for the job, and the person least prepared to sell herself, the most diffident, was Marjorie, a few years older than I, but someone who seemed a good deal older. To her surprise I gave her the job. I saw in her a personality that was warm modest yet one with an enquiring mind and the ability to reach out to people. It was  the best employment decisions I ever made. I am not a good judge of character, and over the years I had employed a number of people I should never have had anything to do with, but with Marjorie I got it right. I believe that she had little formal education, but to make up for it, she had read widely. She had the remarkable ability to open a book, any book, at random and establish a personal connection with it. She found a place she knew, people she had connections with, no matter how distant, stories that had special meaning for her. And as with books, she established immediate personal connections with people. She never had to sell a book, people came to seek her advice, came to chat with her, share their lives with her, and always walked out with a book if not with a whole bundle of books. She was a natural bookseller. And she was so successful at selling books because people saw in her a compassionate wise human being who could understand others, total strangers who became friends. People remembered Marjorie many years after she had left my shop and moved to Nelson when Bernie, her husband was transferred there. We all missed her, I did, my customers did. And Marjorie missed my shop, the books, the people. As a bookseller she found self-fulfilment, and respect. She hadn't had an easy life, brought up four children, and like many women of her generation, she was a mother, a housewife, perhaps a hostess, but getting a job in her early fifties, a job that offered a lot of job satisfaction, was something that she always valued. With her wide reading, she sought a spiritual anchor and found it in Buddhism. Last week her daughter, Mary, rang us from Eltham, Taranaki, to tell us that Marjorie passed away.She was 88 years old and frail in the last few years. She had a full Buddhist funeral.