Indie Bookstore, Heart of a Beach Town

My parents bought a second home in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, when I was six years old. It was 1983, a time when you could still buy beach property without Exxon stock, and the little brick cape house on Grove Street a handful of blocks from the boardwalk was plain but special. In the winter, my two brothers and sister and I would have to wait hours for the heat to come on, the baseboards slowly clicking to life. We didn’t keep our bathing suits or beach chairs there. We had no cable TV. We rode our bikes everywhere. We bought T-shirts and ate caramel corn and played Q*bert and Donkey Kong at the arcade. We sat at Grotto Pizza with a pitcher of birch beer and a steaming large pie, and at night we would shake Yahtzee dice and rent VHS movies like Dirty Dancing or The Money Pit from a pop-up place in town. When we drove the four hours from our home in Pennsylvania to Rehoboth, one other constant always awaited us: Browseabout Books.