I was unaware of the closing of Transitions Bookstore in 2008 until recently...
I've been traveling less in the past few years, having "perched" in Idaho to focus on writing/publishing my next book. While transferring website content during the new "makeover." My webmaster and I noticed that a link to the Transitions website was broken. This is how I learned that one of my all-time-favorite speaking venues had closed.
Transitions Bookstore always projected an elegant, credible "mainstream" style, with an inventory that was very intuitive in it's response to customers on the verge of awakening spiritually, as well as seekers who sought to explore deeper. Gayle is a gem, and I sincerely hope that she and her husband have moved onto an equally fulfilling, giving, and enlightening endeavor. Here is the article that I found from the Chicago Tribune:
Transitions – “Grooviest Bookstore in Chicago” – closes
By Mary Schmich
August 17, 2008
If Gayle Seminara-Mandel were going to recommend one book to people who have just suffered a deep loss, it would be “Peace Is Every Step” by the Vietnamese Zen Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh.
It’s a book she could use right now.
On Friday, Seminara-Mandel and her husband, Howard, closed Transitions, the bookstore and cafe they’ve run for 19 years.
“This place changed a lot of people’s lives,” said Tom Andrade, a lab technician who stopped in to hug Seminara-Mandel goodbye. He started coming here in 1997, he told her, to a study group on mindfulness. “This place changed a lot of people’s lives.”
Seminara-Mandel dabbed her eyes with a cafe napkin.
The reviewers at citysearch.com once called Transitions, which sat next to the Lincoln Park Whole Foods, “the grooviest bookstore in town.”
I called it the Inner-Self Cafe and used it as a model for the self-help bookstore and espresso bar where my fictional column characters, Sissy and Missy, met to talk.
Transitions was unique in Chicago, sleeker than the ordinary new-age bookstore, homier than a Borders.
Retirees and tattooed young people hung out there, along with yoga teachers and businesspeople. It was a haven for recovering addicts.
All the big names in self-improvement came to Transitions, often before they were big enough for Oprah or PBS fundraising drives.
There was Eckhart Tolle (“The Power of Now”). Wayne Dyer (“The Power of Intention”). Andrew Weil (“Spontaneous Healing”).
The Mandels rented out the Park West for Deepak Chopra (“Spontaneous Fulfillment”).
It wasn’t the big names, however, who built Transitions. It was the ordinary people who came to write novels, mend friendships, recover from divorces or buy books counseling them on how.
“When I come here,” said Rachel Fiske, who was there to say goodbye, “I turn my ringer off. It’s a sacred space, an informal, casual, sacred space.”
But everything, even the best of things, runs its course. Seminara-Mandel realized Transitions was in trouble when she started seeing $10 Buddhas for sale at Target.
“Good Buddhas,” she said. But the ones she imported from Tibet cost a lot more.
The world was different when the Mandels opened Transitions. He had been a commodities trader addicted to cocaine. She had worked in advertising.
They were both in recovery programs—him for his addiction, her for her enabling—the day in 1989 that a drunken driver rammed into their Honda Prelude. The car was demolished. The Mandels survived. And vowed to do something more meaningful with their lives.
Yoga and Buddhism weren’t pop-culture staples then. Good incense was hard to find.
The Mandels’ book selection was exotic too, a unique blend of self-help, good fiction and smart non-fiction.
And then?
“The readers went away,” Seminara-Mandel said Friday as customers wandered in, lured by the signs that promised 50 percent off everything. The meditation cushions, the singing bowls, the best CDs were gone. Books lingered.
In the past few years, more and more customers came for the free WiFi and fewer for the books.
Self-improvement? Eastern spirituality?
You could get that on the Web or order it from amazon.com.
Seminara-Mandel, 52, is a former South Side Catholic girl turned Buddhist who calls herself “the epitome of perkiness.”
Cheerful and sweetly tough, she hung on as the store struggled, thinking, “If there’s all this [expletive] in the room, there must be a pony.”
But at some point struggle feels like grasping, and, as the Buddhists counsel, grasping causes pain.
Finally, Seminara-Mandel and her husband arrived at their own transition. They conceded they could no longer pay the rent and make the payroll.
Seminara-Mandel knows that losing the bookstore is small compared with what other people have suffered, which is why, when I asked, she recommended Thich Nhat Hanh’s book for anyone suffering a loss, of a person, a job, a way of life.
After I left Transitions for the last time Friday, I found a page of the book on amazon. The chapter was called “Twenty-Four Brand-New Hours.”
“We are very good at preparing to live,” it said, “but not very good at living. We know how to sacrifice 10 years for a diploma, and we are willing to work very hard to get a job, a car, a house and so on. But we have difficulty remembering that we are alive in the present moment, the only moment there is for us to be alive.”