An Encounter at the Library

 

"Excuse me," the voice said politely, coming from directly behind me.

I came out of my momentary reverie, standing in front of the free library kiosk in the park, as part of my daily inspection of its contents after coming back from a walk around the soccer fields. I had been looking through the children's section on the bottom shelf, evaluating which of the books was the most interesting to read, in terms of story and graphics. I had found a very slender paperback adaptation of The Tale of Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter. It was "adapted down" for beginning readers with a simpler text but delightfully it still had the illustrations, which I was looking over. It brought back pleasant memories of my maternal grandmother, who loved those stories and had figurines of the animals, which now are in my sister's possession in Colorado.

Jolted back to awareness of my surroundings, and embarrassed for no reason to have been lingering in front of the library, I pivoted around, still holding the Peter Rabit book.

There on the path I saw a woman, in her forties, carrying an armful of books. She apologized for disturbing me. She had brought a load of books to donate to the library. It could see they would barely fit. She placed them all on the upper shelf, which was now throughly crowded with books.

I noticed one of the books was a coffee table book about the history of Des Moines.  I made small talk, asking if she was from there. She said she'd lived there for about five years, in West Des Moines. Most everyone around here is from elsewhere. I mentioned that I was born in Ames.  

"Now I'm moving again," she said, laughing about the comedy of life. 

She said she was originally from North Dakota and then picked up one of the paperbacks she had place in the library, called The Murdered Family, which she said was based on a true incident in her home state. She said it was a great read, but true crime is not my genre.

After she left I went back to the library and examined the stack she had left. Among them was an enormous coffee table book about Louis Vuitton. The books on the top shelf were now way to messy so I spent a minute rearranging them so they would fit better. It felt so Scottsdale to see the enormous Louis Vuitton book. I read the front overlay, which told me it was about the original person Louis Vuitton and the invention of the first great traveling bag in the mid 19th century, and by extension, the "creation of luxury". It was fascinating to learn this while standing there, as I knew nothing about the subject, but I knew the book was not for me.

Still I fell compelled to take at least one book, as the library was now getting overcrowded, as it sometimes does. I myself had begun to consider books I would want to donate, and was compiling a mental list as I was sorting things in the garage (which I had been doing right before the walk). 

I noticed on the bottom shelf a nice hard-bound volume of the poetry or Robert Frost, including the complete versions of his first five books. It had been placed here by someone else. Having just been meditating on lines of Frost a few days before, which I wrote about here, I decided this had to be the book for me.  I"You're coming home with me," I said while cradling it it. 

To make more room, I also took one of the hard backs she had donated, a biography of Jack Kennedy by Chris Matthews. I am continually doing research about certain figures associated with the Kennedy Administration, and am currently reading The Patriarch.  As I always do with such books, wherever I find them, I flip open the index and look for certain names, and although I didn't see the name I wanted, I decided it was probably a light read and could use it to correlate with The Patriarch.  It turned out to be a good gamble because when I got home, I read the introduction and the figure I mentioned appears right in the first few pages as the author talks about his political awareness as a child in the 1950s.

As for the Peter Rabbit learn-to-read book, I placed it back in the kid's section, a thin green item amidst the other thin children's books on the bottom shelf. Maybe I will look for it each time I go out, and read a little from it, although there is hardly anything to read in it. Rabbits put me in a good mood.