The used book store in my town closed last week because the landlord raised the rent. At the last day half-price sale I picked up a Charles Dickens’ which seemed fitting in the soon-to-be orphaned space.

Books were off the shelves. Shelves off the walls. Unsold books were piled on makeshift plywood carts, no longer aligned in elegant alphabetical order. The staff offered cider and tried to be upbeat but I kind of felt like a fringe relative picking through the remains of the empty family home.

Too dramatic? Maybe. But how else can you react when a book store disappears?  The used book store was a fixture on Main Street.  A destination bookstore for fans from out of the area, a rainy day stop for locals and a fitting shelter for your own old books when it was their time to move on.

The staff said the old book business will be folded into another store in a nearby town but they hope to one day return.  Yeah, we know what happens when a good old friend packs up.

Meanwhile, just around the corner the town library closed. For remodeling, said the sign. The librarians promise it will be more jumping than ever when it re-opens. The same library reduced its schedule last year. Regulars get nervous when a library cuts hours, thins staff and puts up a closed sign, if only for three months.

I’m not going to blame any of this on my friends who’ve gone over to the dark side. Kindles, Nooks and e-readers are clearly here to stay and I’ve tried to stop grousing about them, saving my curled lip for landlords who raise the rent in a recession.

Over Christmas I was in a bookstore line when the man behind me held up State of Wonder by Ann Patchett and asked if I knew the book. I said I was waiting for the paperback. He was buying it for his wife, he said, adding that she had breast cancer and loved women authors. Who else would I recommend? I said our book club is wild for Alice Munro. He excused himself and disappeared into the M section.

Ann Patchett has opened up her own independent book store in Nashville. She said she has no interest in living in a city without a bookstore. And who would?Although the used book emporium is gone from our town the independent bookstore with new books thankfully hangs in there.

Last winter in Truckee my daughter and granddaughter and I trudged through a mountain blizzard to a small book store, warm and smelling of hot chocolate. I found an Edith Wharton, my daughter a Bill Bryson and my granddaughter a picture book. Is there a comparable Kindle moment?

If everyone was to eventually give up hard copy books and go electronic our towns would lose their literary center. And what would become of the books themselves?

We have six bookcases in our small two bedroom house. When they fill up and we need to purge we take our books to the hospice thrift store. Or give them to the library for their book sale. Or take them to the late great used book store downtown.

Knowing your books will find a good new home makes it easier to give them up. It would be a sin to throw a book in the trash or put it into a recycling bin. To do so would surely call forth the ghosts of the greats. Emily Dickinson might haunt you, as well she should, and I imagine she can be pretty snappish.

In the film Illegal Belgian police board a plane handcuffed to an undocumented immigrant they are escorting out of the country. The weeping woman cries out that she is being forced to leave her child and the other passengers immediately side with her. They berate the immigration officers who are ordered off the plane by the pilot with the woman. She gets beat up for her outburst and returned to a deportation center.

Stories of people struggling to make it in another country are a favorite plot line. Coincidentally it was in three of the last novels I read. The Northern African families in southern France in Bruno, Chief of Police. Polish war refugees in England in 22 Britannia Road.  The young Irish woman in New York in the book Brooklyn.

Adjusting to a foreign land, learning the language and the culture, missing your homeland and feeling often unwelcome and suspect in the new country make good stories.

And we relate, since except for Native Americans, most of us wouldn’t be here had an ancestor not come first as an immigrant. Maybe in a proper legal manner, maybe not.

But then there are today’s undocumented immigrants.  Lured here by the promise of work and a safer, better life for their family, like many of our own great-great-greats, they exist quietly, hoping to stay under society’s radar.

They are the voiceless ones in the middle of a loud, often angry debate over immigration. Republican campaigners argue over who would build the highest fence. Border vigilantes go on a hunt. The Supreme Court will get into it next year when it reviews a tough Arizona law targeting illegal immigrants. And the rest of us get all twisted up over what is the best way to deal with what we call “the immigration issue.”

Behind the issue are real people, of course, like Elida and Sam Mejia who escaped political violence in Guatemala in 1992 and came to California with their infant son Gilbert. They bought a home in Novato and had two daughters, Helen and Dulce. The father worked as a carpenter, the mother as a hotel housekeeper.

All was well until immigration officers, ostensibly looking for someone else, stormed the house and demanded their papers. And two years ago the family had to divide itself.

Their story is told in a short documentary, Sin Pais (Without Country) made by Theo Rigby and making the rounds of independent film festivals and social justice organizations. It will be broadcast nationally on PBS next summer.

I saw it at a Jewish synagogue in Santa Rosa where people don’t have to go back many generations to know about fleeing their homeland. College professor Madeleine Rose introduced the film and said that her father, a Holocaust survivor, came to this country from Luxembourg, also illegally. He knew, she said, that “a border can mean life or death.”

Elida and Sam Mejia were deported and forced to split up their children. They took their little girl, who’s an American citizen, with them back to Guatemala. The two teenagers, Helen, an American citizen, and Gilbert, who is undocumented, stayed in Marin County.

The parents and younger daughter are temporarily visiting California on a humanitarian parole and after the documentary joined the filmmaker on stage. Elida Mejia did most of the talking, at one point wiping her eyes and saying, “This is no life.”

The audience was crying too. Rigby, the young filmmaker, said he has found sympathetic audiences “even in places known for being immigrant unfriendly, such as Arizona or Texas.”

Immigration reform is not an easy issue but people like the Mejia family should not be demonized. They came here and got jobs, learned English, bought a house, paid taxes, educated their kids, bought refrigerators and cars. Give them the right papers and they’d be regular Americans.

The morning before I talked to Shirley MacLaine I saw a bumper sticker in my neighborhood that said “Multi-dimensional and loving it.” It all seemed so synchronistic, so meant to be. Of course I live in Northern California and the famous actress/author/channeler lives in Santa Fe. Places that are comfortable with the woo-woo.

But Shirley said, oh no. It’s everywhere. In fact as she does her one woman show around the country, performing in Santa Rosa last weekend, the audience asks her more about mystical stuff than the movies. “I show them film clips of the Rat Pack and talk about Dean and Frank. And what do they want to ask me about? About the things in my books. They want to know what does this memory mean? Why am I here?

“You know why? Because the world’s in a terrible mess. The civilization is faltering. Everyone’s looking for answers.”

I like Shirley. I like that she says she’s never going to stop asking why. And that while many scoffed at her claims of reincarnation and books on psychic searching she did a lot to help nudge the mainstream into considering what else is out there.

I also love that she’s 77 and vibrant. With those long legs and that delighted laugh that goes with the grinning twinkling face.  As a friend said, “That woman had cute down pat.”

At her age, however, cute is not big enough. More like nicely seasoned. Now she’s written a book called I’m Over All That.. and Other Confessions. It’s her 13th book. The woman has sold  20 million books.

She’s made 63 films including the new Bernie with Jack Black. It’s about a funeral director in Texas. “I play the town bitch,” she bragged.

She also just won the Legion of Honor in France, that country’s most prestigious cultural award. For those looking for role models on how to stay passionate, relevant and visible Shirley MacLaine is a good one.

She’s adamant about daily exercise – yoga, tai chi, stretching exercises for her hips -“you have to take care of your hips.” She lives alone with her dog,  prefers hanging out with friends to Hollywood parties, had a face lift at 50 and colors her hair red to match her spirit which is one of the best rationalizations I’ve ever heard for covering the gray.

Another beauty tip: “No overhead lights. They make you look like Grandma Moses.”

Her role as Aurora, the controlling mother in Terms of Endearment, is the one she best relates to personally. “Impossible at times, all over the map with her emotions, funny, judgmental, loving.” We talked about the scene where her hospitalized daughter needs pain meds and no one brings her any until Aurora rages after them. They’re delivered and she quietly says, “Thank you.”

“We did that in one take,” she said. “I don’t know if that was pure Aurora or pure Shirely MacLaine.”

About the men she’s bedded, it felt so People Magazine-y to ask. But of course I checked them out in her book.  Yes on Robert Mitchum and Yves Montand. No on Jack Lemmon. Too nice. And Jack Nicholson, too dangerous. I told her that my husband lovingly recalls the shot of her in Irma le Douce walking up the stairs in her green tights. He says it is forever etched in his mind.

That brought the famous laugh.