I stopped in at Old Wives Tales on Valencia this afternoon . Got Mom a belated Mother’s Day gift of Alterhorn earrings, and a pair for myself. It’s a feminist gift shop that offers a fairly even selection of the lovely and the hideous. Female torsos decorate the walls along with spider web glass clocks and Kathe Kollwitz posters.

Old Wives Tales, which closed in 1996, was an important feminist bookstore, run as a non-profit collective by 1988. When we went to eat at We Be Sushi or pick up something at Lucca’s Ravioli, I always walked down the street to either go into Old Wives Tales or peer through its window. I remember it being staffed mainly by dauntingly intelligent and handsome lesbians.

Now it’s just a ghost — or rather, a smaller ghost of that host of phantoms that make up the larger ghost of Valencia Street in the ’80s.