Lurking in the Library

I am sorely tempted to write about how much I dislike what I wrote yesterday, how ineptly I explained what I am working on, how much I prefer the writing itself to the often necessary explication. But that would be doing exactly what I am saying I dislike: more explication. And who are you Anonymous Grammatician? I am ashamed of my honing in mistake as well. I sort of knew it wasn't right but was too lazy to make sure.

So instead, I will write again about a library, about libraries.

The word lurking is a little creepy, no? I promise you, I am not wearing a trenchcoat; I am not actually lurking, so no Webster's definitions, please. I am lingering, perhaps, is a better word, in a library, after teaching in one, and I am going to have to force myself to leave.

This is an elementary school library: shades of the Goodnow, my hometown library, which I have written about before, and my own school library, in which I first discovered The New Yorker, and how much I loved lying prone on industrial grade school carpeting and reading for hours at a time, waiting to be picked up. There are certain advantages in hindsight to having a mother who works and is generally late.

But the library I want to write about now is neither of those, nor my high school library, which I also loved but associate unfortunately now with a paper I researched, outlined and wrote in entirety in the three periods before an Art History class senior year, a paper on Egyptian jewelry, a topic in which (then and now) I have no interest whatsoever.

The Concord Public Library is across the street from my high school. If you know a little bit about American literature, or transcendentalism, or Concord itself, you may imagine that the library in Concord is, well, special. And it is. Not that the ghost of Emerson or Alcott is floating over the circulation desk or anything, but still. It's not only a beautiful building, light-filled, spacious, but with all the nooks and oddly dark pockets a proper library must contain, it feels like a place where reading is elevated, even holy. There are first editions and really old, velvety-covered versions of some pretty amazing books. I guess you could say: duh, it's a library. And all libraries are a little like that. But this one is a little bit more.

Anyway, the hours I logged just reading in this library make me think of how little time kids seem to have these days to do this--or whatever another kid's version of this would be. I had lots of activities, I played an after-school sport every season, but both of my parents worked, and we didn't have a third car for us, and whenever there was sufficient time between the end of practice and when somebody could come and get me, I crossed the street, found a book, and wandered around this library until the spot felt right. Often, the spot felt right in the children's room, which makes sense to me as the children's room in my hometown library was essentially a home away from home. I was also less likely to be spotted there by friends or acquaintances from school doing research projects. I never actually worked in the Concord library; I only read.

Often, and I am not sure if this was a result of or a reason for finding a spot in the children's room, I read children's books. Not picture books, obviously, but the classic books I'd read over and over as a child. As an adolescent, I found these books inordinately comforting. High school is tough. It's very strange to be in a major period of transition while being wholly cognizant of said transition; usually transitions either sneak up on you or come on like a sudden storm. But high school--it's like being stuck in quicksand with safe-seeming banks on either side and having to kill time there, flailing around, sinking by degrees, for four long years. Don't get me wrong; I loved high school, mostly. But I was painfully conscious of leaving childhood behind and terrified of the other side of that bank.

And I was in Concord, after all. So I read Louisa May again, sometimes: not Little Women so much as the more obscure ones, Jack and Jill, A Rose in Bloom. And it was during this period that I discovered Emerson's essays, that I first read "Self-Reliance" and "Experience," memorizing the lines as actual children cavorted around me, waiting for the reading hour.

Writing this, I am remembering that this was a little bit of a secret, this slipping across the street on an afternoon to read away the afternoon like this. Most days, I suppose, I was actually at Brigham's or the Old North Bridge or driving around in somebody's car. Or, more likely, at practice or a game. But I prefer to remember the layout of the shelves, the way in one back section of the library they made an L that enclosed a little area under a window, the way I would lean up against one of the cushions they had lying around for this purpose exactly, and forget entirely about my Chemistry test, Lacrosse try-outs, papers way overdue (always these) and just read.

I need to slow down. I know this somewhere deep inside. I want to slow down. I want Lily and Annika to be able to read like this. Does adulthood ever allow for this kind of out-of-time?