This morning at work, to quell the mood of a Monday, I put my earphones on and fired up Pandora to listen to my Dave Koz station.

And for a moment, I was back in Marin County.

I was in a cool fall evening, in a moment when the sky was a deepening purple beyond the parking lot lights, and it was after a misty rain sprinkled the Bay Area, and I was walking through the wet air into the comfortably chic little bookstore at Larkspur Landing, a Clean Well-Lighted Place for Books. It was always colorful and busy, that little bookstore north of the seminary a few miles past Corte Madera on 101, and occasionally on weekends I would leave the sterile off-white walls of my dorm room to breathe in a little of the community there.

And in the bookstore there were people. People. People, and rugs. And books.

Outside there were Mercedes and BMW’s and Audi’s in the parking lot, and inside there were young couples with children squat on the floor in the kids section, and young men in biking gear, checking out the cycling trails in a guide about Northern California, and older men in tightly knitted sweaters and slacks asking about special medical titles or an obtuse volume of literary criticism or a book on the evolution of polypores, while their wife was chatting with an acquaintance or two somewhere behind him in an offset nook.

This was a comfy upscale bookstore in a quietly trendy mall hidden away in one of the wealthiest counties in the country, and when I went to it, there was always smooth jazz playing through the overhead speakers, and I felt like I was in a comfy hobbit hole when I visited it, which was not frequently.

And outside of summer, there was always spray in the air. The sky would be lavender or cottony white or cyan or rosy, and there would still be the dewy air spritzing you under the anemic daylight.

Larkspur Landings was a nice place to visit. I guess because of the internet, the bookstore succumbed to flagging sales in 2008. And then the little mall followed it, into history.

And I guess it was resurrected as Marin Country Mart.

I always liked escaping to that book store to scan the stacks. I never bought much there because money back then was so rare, but going to it still felt like a casual amusement park vacation to me.

I am sure that despite the fact that fine store is long gone, the smooth jazz and the spritzing are still happening there to this day.