June 23, 2021: Another First Time Since, and a First Time Ever!

I had a late afternoon checkup with the periodontist, way out on 122^nd, and got another text message asking me if I’d left with a smile on my face.  (Eye roll.) But, yes, sortof.

I felt cheerful upon leaving, because I had noticed, while tooling down 122^nd, that the parking lot of the Midland Branch of the library was full.  I remembered reading that Midland is now open to the public. Maybe I would Actually Go In, if they were still open after my appointment. It would be my first visit to a library since! That was an exciting thought!

Belmont is my beloved neighborhood branch, and it’s a tiny jewel. I’ve never been to Midland, which is new and vast, with a lot of cool artwork.

They were closing shortly, and only a few patrons were there. I was greeted by three friendly women when I walked into the lobby. I hate to be ungrateful, but I wanted much less greeting.

They asked if I had come to pick up my holds. No, I’d just come to be inside of a library for a few minutes. Did I need help finding something? No, thanks. I wanted to poke around. I wanted to browse. I just wanted to be back inside a library. It had been a long time.

They wanted so much to help me that I felt rude. We were temporarily at an impasse, and then one said, “Welcome back!” and gestured me onward. I made it about twenty feet before a fourth helper appeared. I can’t fault her – I was looking around like I’d never been there before, which I hadn’t. I turned her down, too.

So here’s the thing: it was wonderful to be in a library again, but it wasn’t my library. And the helpful librarians weren’t my librarians. I was all ready to be choked up, but instead it felt slightly surreal, an impostor library in a dream. It wasn't home. 

Also, my browsing muscles were flabby. It’s been months of going online to put a specific item on hold, three minutes, into the website and out. I’d forgotten how to do serendipity.

Actually, it’s possible I don’t have strong browsing muscles. Belmont has a bookshelf of hot new titles, and another where the librarians put their personal recommendations, and a third where they have a monthly theme, Pride, or Black Lives Matter, or Immigration, or some other progressive topic, balm throughout the last administration. And honestly, their selections are brilliant, so I peruse those shelves every time. Midland no doubt has similar shelves, but then I’d have had to be guided, and I just wanted to be left alone to have my little emotional library rendezvous, if emotion was vouchsafed me.

So I walked the aisles, wondering what I was looking for, and finding lots of things I wasn’t looking for. Which, I remembered, was how serendipity worked.

And then!

Flashback:  somewhere mid-pandemic, somebody asked What Book Have You Always Wanted to Read, But Never Read? This question disturbed me. I couldn’t think of anything. And in that weird pandemic-guilt way, I felt I OUGHT to have something I’d always wanted to read, and I OUGHT to be reading it during this prolonged downtime! And conversely, I felt that if there was something I’d always wanted to read, I had NO EXCUSE for having forgotten what it was, and as a retired person, I had NO EXCUSE for not having read it by now. (I believe I held up pretty well during the pandemic, but there were moments….)

Anyway, after long rumination, I answered the query, “Maybe Proust? But I reserve the right to spend five minutes trying Proust and then to decide he is not for me.”

Back to the present:  There on the shelf was Remembrance of Things Past! I checked it out! I just spent TEN minutes trying Proust, and he’s great! I’m not saying I have the oomph to get through the 1,000 pages of the first two sections, but I have now read my very first ten minutes of Proust! I’m feeling quite proud of myself!

Second flashback:  Every now and then I worry that I’m a disgrace to my English major. I can’t appreciate Henry James, for instance. In one of those shame spirals, years ago, I decided I was a  wimp because I had not tackled Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner. I grimly set out to find a copy and read it. Which took seventeen minutes, start to finish. Haha! Somehow, I had imagined it was the length of Paradise Lost. Nope. Tonight, hefting my volume of Proust, I remembered that experience. Only I couldn’t remember the title of the poem. So I searched “albatross poem,” and up it came, as I knew it would. We live in an age of wonders.