It Was What He Read
He came to the library every day, taking a seat at the heavy wooden table midway into the reading room. He wore khaki slacks, a neatly pressed cotton shirt and loafers, an East Coast look that had become familiar to me from my first year at college in Maine. Age? Older than me; younger than my father.
It was not his appearance that captivated me. It was what he read.
I had a summer job at the Washoe County Library in Reno, where I grew up. I wanted to be a librarian. The library was a place of calm, of order, of quiet excitement. Books were my refuge, my passion, my friends. “There is no frigate like a book.” The line from Emily Dickinson’s poem was in my bones.
Part of my job that summer was to clear the reading tables at the end of the day. That’s how I knew what he read: history, philosophy, art, poetry. I was enchanted.
College had changed me. I was newly slim and my hair reached beyond my shoulders. I delighted in the cotton skirts and dresses that nipped my waist. In class, we had read Alan Paton’s “Cry the Beloved County” and C.P. Snow’s “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution.”
I’d spent hours in Coram Library at Bates College, preparing for classes, writing themes, thinking. I felt awakened to new ideas and perplexing ways of thinking.
That summer in Reno was coming to an end when he left his reading station early in the day. I heard him thank the woman at the checkout counter for her help and for the comfortable time he’d spent in the library. He was leaving.
He went down the steps to the street below. I could see him from the window. I ran to catch up with him and we spoke for the first time. He asked if he could walk me home. We crossed the railroad tracks, passed the old brick houses shaded by elm trees, the fraternity house with the recumbent lion statues. When we reached my family’s small house on Bisby Street, we said good-bye.
The attendant who checked me in for my flight back to college bent under her desk and brought out a long white box. A dozen red roses and a card: “For someone more woman than girl. For something that might have been.”
Bonnie Mesinger does her reading and remembering in King Salmon.
