Ode to the Library

 

You’re wandering the downtown sidewalks looking for a place that’s warm and quiet when you see a pretty girl crossing the street. Where is she off to? you wonder and so you follow. Maybe she knows of a nice spot where you can sit for a while and just as you think this she turns and walks into the library.

You’ve never been inside the library before and now you have to wonder why not because it’s just the thing: literature, reference books, music, films, newspapers from around the world—thousands of ways to enrich and intoxicate the mind and all for the price of a promise that you’ll bring it all back on time.

There’s the pretty girl again, emerging from behind a shelf with a book in her hands. You follow her to the other side of the room where she places herself at a table and begins to read; you grab the nearest hardcover and sit where you can watch her. Her attention is rapt—what could she be reading? Who is she? She looks around and catches you staring so you quickly hide behind the pages of your own book, Coping with Irritable Bowel Syndrome. You blush and lay the book flat.

Half an hour passes. You steal glances at this captivating woman until she eventually gets up—this is your chance—leaving her book on the table. You wander over and pick it up. Doggy Discipline: Better Pet Behaviour in Six Weeks, but this was not what you expected. What a neat surprise and what an important thing for community members to have a space where they can come together and learn about each other in this exciting way. How remarkable it is to hold a book like Doggy Discipline which only seconds earlier was in the hands of a complete stranger. But is she a stranger? You know so much about her already: she’s a library patron, a fellow reader, a pet owner. You sign up for a borrower’s card and take the book home, running your fingers along its spine for the duration of the bus ride.

Later as you’re sitting down to dinner, you notice the book on the edge of the table. A strange feeling passes through you, as if you’re not alone. The pretty girl from the library is there too, by way of the book you have both held and enjoyed that very day. You lift Doggy Discipline to your nose and a lovely, floral scent wafts from its pages; this is the sweet aroma of your new friend. You caress the individual edges of the paper as you open the book, where her thumbs had turned the pages hours earlier and marvel at the intimacy of the library experience. You plant a kiss on the book’s cover—right on the nose of the golden retriever in the photograph—and know that somewhere a pretty girl is swooning.

Throughout your meal you speak to the book as if she were there with you because, in a way she is. You tell her about your daily life as a parking attendant, your dreams of owning your own lot and how all your old friends had moved away years ago—the whole story. She is helpless but to listen. But how one-sided, you think, and so you turn to page thirty-five and extract a reply: “Make sure to use the choke-chain properly, or you may cause damage to your dog’s throat/neck.”

You bring the book to bed that night thinking you’ll give it a read before drifting off. You lay on your back, letting your eyes fall upon the same words her eyes had studied so carefully in the library. By the time you reach the chapter on making your own punitive apple face-spray, your arms are too tired to hold the book upright any longer and so you lay it on the pillow beside your own. “Good night, pretty girl,” you whisper and fall asleep with your hand between the pages.

The next day, you take the book to work and cram an extra stool into the attendant’s booth for it to rest on. You prattle on about various things, read random passages from its pages when it’s slow and before you know it, it’s your lunch hour. How quickly a day passes when you don’t have to spend it alone! You skip the food court for today and head to the library instead—maybe you’ll see the pretty girl. The pretty girl is not there and so you return to the library every day that week—sometimes more than once—in the hopes that you’ll run into her again. You bring Doggy Discipline with you each time so she’ll notice you reading it and recognize a kindred spirit but the girl remains absent. The following Saturday morning, however, you see her pass by the library window.

In a panic, you shove the book into your bag and run outside. You see her crossing the street at the end of the block and are almost flattened by a bus. You catch up and follow the pretty girl—just as you had done the first time you saw her—until you reach a bungalow by the river, just outside downtown. She goes inside while you stand behind a row of bushes to look at her little house. You hear a dog bark relentlessly inside and the occasional hiss of what you assume to be homemade face-spray. It’s windy by the river and you begin to shiver in the cold. You remember the warmth of the library and the wonderful feeling of community you felt the first day you went in. What a simple, lovely thing: how two people, who otherwise might never have met, are able to cross paths amongst the stacks of books; how one of these people, now that the two are connected in this way, might ask the other to borrow a sweater when passing by on a chilly day; how it would be no big deal, should the passerby happen to be a bit shy, for him to simply grab a sweater from the clothesline in the other’s backyard and continue on his way. You walk home in comfort, warmed by the kind offering of the pretty girl.

Once home, you remove the sweater and lay it out on your bed. Fetching Doggy Discipline from your bag, you stick the bottom of the book through the sweater’s collar and squint. It looks just like the pretty girl. You lie down beside her and clutch one of her soft sleeves to your chest.

You don’t see the pretty girl at the library anymore but occasionally you pass by her bungalow after work and watch from the bushes. Sometimes she steps outside with her dog, whose behaviour, you notice, is improving with each visit. What she’s up to doesn’t really matter though because everything you need is at home, lying on your bed. Someone you can rely on; someone who won’t move away and leave you all alone; someone to watch movies and laugh and go for walks with. And you don’t mind that you’re obliged to bring your new companion back to the library for renewal every three weeks to avoid late fines. The love of Doggy Discipline may be on loan but you now know this: borrowed happiness is happiness nonetheless.