Daddy told me never leave the house without my tool.
The place where I watched my first sunset of the New Year is called Constitution Square.
I ran an errand at the bank, on the way discussing my future and my impending departure with a family friend. Then, I made my way to the public library, my first such visit since I came home. Maybe the change in temperature was responsible for the moisture welling in my eyes as I browsed the small New Fiction corner and made my way down the halls stroking the spines of William Styron and Peter Matthiessen and Elizabeth Bear and China Miéville.
It occurred to me that the thing I feel there, the same thing I felt when, as a kid, I would be left at the Barnes & Noble in Farmington while Mom took the girls summer-shopping at nearby Westfarms Mall, is the thing I feel whenever I spend time in the family game-room. My books surround me. Many of them are yet unread. Some of them have bent and lined spines while others look untouched, their page-edges bronzed with time.
I always knew that the physical presence of books offered me a different genre of comfort than I found anywhere else, but I hadn't realized how explicit was my attempt to recreate the library where I spent so much of my adolescence. That shelter I fled to whenever, as a teenager, I came home from high school and, later, college. Wandering down the L's and pausing at the S's, it felt like I'd come home all over again.
I never seem to feel lost in a place like that.
I ran an errand at the bank, on the way discussing my future and my impending departure with a family friend. Then, I made my way to the public library, my first such visit since I came home. Maybe the change in temperature was responsible for the moisture welling in my eyes as I browsed the small New Fiction corner and made my way down the halls stroking the spines of William Styron and Peter Matthiessen and Elizabeth Bear and China Miéville.
It occurred to me that the thing I feel there, the same thing I felt when, as a kid, I would be left at the Barnes & Noble in Farmington while Mom took the girls summer-shopping at nearby Westfarms Mall, is the thing I feel whenever I spend time in the family game-room. My books surround me. Many of them are yet unread. Some of them have bent and lined spines while others look untouched, their page-edges bronzed with time.
I always knew that the physical presence of books offered me a different genre of comfort than I found anywhere else, but I hadn't realized how explicit was my attempt to recreate the library where I spent so much of my adolescence. That shelter I fled to whenever, as a teenager, I came home from high school and, later, college. Wandering down the L's and pausing at the S's, it felt like I'd come home all over again.
I never seem to feel lost in a place like that.