Shoes and Books

The past two Saturdays, I have found my way to the Central Library in the downtown of this city.  The emptiness of the streets on a weekend sends hollow, haunted messages through the grey cement corridors that once thronged with life: storefront signs that blinkered in sequence, rococo movie theaters, department stores ponderous as a city block, with tony restaurants squeezed into narrow slots between the larger buildings.  All I saw at that time were pants legs or nyloned calves at my five year old height, while gripping Mom's hand so as not to be washed away by the current of human electricity. The sidewalks were packed with people.  No one wore sneakers for going out, everyone had leather shoes which resulted in a flurry of staccato slap slaps of soles and heels on pavement.  Not a sound you hear these days, it was like rain on a roof, an audience applauding.  Slap slap slap.  They were on their way, and in a hurry to arrive.

There is little to do downtown, only a few stores remain, most of the properties have been converted to office space.  What else could be done, for not only has this place lost half of the population to suburbs, but there is now a little used subway line that tore up the middle of Main Street, eliminating cars, storefront access, and pedestrian foot traffic.  Owners of once burgeoning businesses tried to hang on, but the pedantic politicians of the day did nothing to shore up a dying city economy.  Malls took over, and we lost the sounds and visions of urban commerce.  I won't walk to the library, it has become too deserted a journey for safety's sake on a lonely weekend.

However, when the door to the library is pushed open, it seems as if the world has found its refuge for it is packed with life, living and literature.  I hadn't been here for over three years, and found the trend towards modernity thriving at the hundred computer stations filled with students, writers, perusers, street people reading to stay warm, children, and me.  It still smells like a library in spite of the hum of bodies or the newer sound of keyboard clacks.  Changes: people aren't as quiet as they used to be, children are running, and conversations are at street level sound.  Entries into the paper indexed card catalog ended in 1998, everything else is on the computer.  You want to do research, you enter your library card identification and a PIN.  Many of the older books I went to in the last century have been discarded, and the next slew reflects the social novelties of this one.  You can check your own books by scanning them over a UPC reader.  What made me happiest was that the library was busy, packed; I wondered if these people would love to be able to grab a bite, shop, or be entertained here, in the city, downtown.

The book I wanted was located in the closed stacks as it was published in 1924, aging had yellowed and dried out the paper.  The pages creaked in the book's spine in spite of tender handling, and small crumbs of pages fluttered like dollhouse snowflakes from the rough-trimmed signatures.  It was an astonishing book to hold; cloth bound, title and author stamped into the front cover, and comfortably not over large.  The topic was not as interesting as hoped, the author embellished in ooey-gooey proclamation the determination shown by her family, plus other autocratic blather.  I enjoyed the physical experience more than the content; I confess, it was a brief fling hatched by curiosity. You've been there.

Get thee to a library, you'll see people from all stratifications reading books and therefore not one of them remains the person they were a second ago.  None of us do, even sitting, but reading accelerates growth, reflection doubles it, then acting on the results goes somewhere into the tenth power of who you are, rippling in and out of clarity and further giving you something to think about while standing over that sink of dishes.

Oh, a bedtime story.  A book lain under a pillow.  Ink on paper that pulls our hearts and minds elsewhere through investigation of fiction or fact, well, it's my favorite thing to do before shutting out the last light, traveling in rhythmic slide to quieter pools and depths of consciousness.  Nets pull in dream fish, waters ripple through memory.  Sleep well, sleep knowing that the story will all turn out alright.