The pages of life keep turning
The town’s library is closing. Two years from now, it will rise again; reconstructed, modernized, and unrecognizable to many of its older patrons. A few weeks before the closing date, I was diligently returning an armful of overdue books when I passed the Children’s Room on the ground floor. Usually, I keep walking. But I could hear a librarian reading out loud and found myself peering into a room full of cross-legged listeners in a semicircle on the carpet. Next thing I knew, the overdue books and I had stepped through the door.
It felt a little illicit to enter a Children’s Room without a child; suspicious at the least and in need of explanation. I thought someone in authority might card me. But everyone was busy listening.
In front of the semicircle, the children’s librarian was reading clearly and with great color, sweeping each page across the room so that every eye saw the picture equally. Children know when someone else is given more of a view, and she was a practiced sweeper.
Page after page held a rhyming riddle; the book was meant to be interactive. The page she had just swept ended with the word wagon. What, she asked, was the rhyming answer?
Her listeners were leaning forward, hamstrings relaxed, in postures I can no longer achieve. One was in full lotus position. Some chins rested thoughtfully on fists. A child fingered his nose in concentration. Standing parents smiled at everyone, particularly their own thinkers. We always love what belongs to us most.
A hand went flying.
“Dragon,” the boy said.
“Dragon,” said someone else, then a third and fourth person.
“DUCK,” a girl yelled.
It was a beautiful scene, and I would like to say that the room was full of memories throwing me into nostalgia for the many times my own child and I had been here. But in fact, we hadn’t. Quiet listening was not on my child’s list of to-do’s. She preferred hanging by her fingers on monkey bars behind the school and once won an award for the bloodiest nose after falling off.
Yet, strangely, I was moved by this experience I had never had. The library was closing, and its many years had a hold on memories that existed, and a few that did not. I hovered in a corner for the rest of the riddles and stayed for the story that followed.
Life flows in one direction, full of construction and deconstruction. Buildings come down. Children grow up. We undergo renovation and we undergo loss. You start as a young mother smiling at cross-legged children (especially your own) and then, a seeming minute later, you are an older person balancing a pile of books in a corner of a Children’s Room — where you don’t really belong — and the library is closing. Such is time passing without choice.
But children are much too young and much too free for this. When the story ended, like sudden birds taking off, they rose up in a clamor. There were books to look through before the library closed, and there would be even more when the library opened again.