As I returned from this morning’s three-mile walk around Lake Harriet, I passed Wild Rumpus Children’s Bookstore. As I often do. A mom and dad and a skinny young boy made their way from their small car (with a Quebec license plate) to the purple front door.

I smiled. I imagined how excited they were to finally make it to this top-notch children’s bookstore. With its resident two cats named after authors but I can’t remember who, its mourning dove and other birds providing indoor chirps. No longer with its underground rat visible under the floor boards.

Wild Rumpus is now part of my Linden Hills neighborhood, still in the same century-old brick building where it opened in 1992. But I didn’t know it yet, as the then owner of OZ Children’s Bookstore in Southwest Harbor, Maine, and a board member of the American Association of Children’s Booksellers. I and my nine colleagues were on a mission.

We flew from various spots around the country to see the new store. Plus, we were worried B.Dalton Booksellers opening a chain of children’s specialty stores such as ours. The first one, we heard, would be located in the humungous Mall of America. The largest mall in the world, I think? But who cares.

That was my first tine in Minneapolis. (I never returned to the Mall of America!)

I didn’t know it yet, but I never imagined that I would someday live up the street from Wild Rumpus. Or that I would live ten minutes in the other direction from my two magnificent grandchildren. They benefit from my long-established personal rule: A book must be purchased whenever I enter an independent bookstore.

I didn’t know it yet. But Wild Rumpus may have been our destination in the above recent photo. “I wish we could have seen your OZ bookstore, SheShe (my grandmother name),” said my nearly six-year-old granddaughter.