Gubbins is back and I have a pair of bright, shiny new Asics sneakers on to celebrate the sports store’s return.
Jon Diat, our fishing writer, wrote last week about how he’d miss Ken Morse’s Tight Lines Tackle store being on Sag Harbor’s Bay Street, as it had been for 23 years, and that’s how Mary and I, and undoubtedly many others here, felt when flooding that originated in a commercial building facing East Hampton Village’s Main Street forced the Gubbinses to retreat before the season to their store in Southampton.
Throughout the summer, people strolling by on Park Place would peer into the empty space and sigh. Would Geary and Barbara and Justin ever come back? It was said at times that they would not, and at other times that they were looking for another place here.
Anyway, it was great to see the skateboards and East Hampton T-shirts in the windows today, and, through the open door, kids running around and animated mothers talking with Geary.
“Keep space for me on the front page,” I said, when I caught his eye. “This is big news.”
And indeed it is. I can’t think of another village store outside of BookHampton that has such an attraction for me. My Asics sneakers say it all: Anima Sana In Corpore Sano. A sound mind in a sound body. And then there’s the soul. I think I can say truly that our souls too would be diminished were there to be no Gubbins or BookHampton here.
One always gets a warm welcome at Gubbins and at BookHampton, for Geary and Jesse Bartel know, I’m sure, that their businesses are of real worth, of real value to people, especially to the people who live here. You can have Gucci and Prada and Louis Vuitton and the rest.
Today, I flashed my sneakers to everyone with whom I talked, and said, “Gubbins is back!”
(I know that in the wider world this week appalling death reigned, though, for the moment, I’d like to speak of life.)