What they’re Missing

I used to think that being near a ball park that was the home to a decent team would be an ideal place to finally call it quits and retire. But that’s not really going to do as much for me as being near a good library. Sure, I’m your typical sucker for checking out books that I never finish — I guess it’s better than buying them. But more so, it’s just the having and holding that makes the difference to me.

In this day and age, you can check them out on line (another function of the local library). You can even listen to them if you want (yet another function). But walking into a nice (usually) quiet space to be confronted by shelves of stories that can take you just about anywhere you want is such an incredible treat.

And even in books, there’s no hurry. I’ve taken Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward Angel, about which I’ve written on this blog, back to the library at least twice now. I’ll get to it. And if no one takes out the sticky note I leave in my partially-read books, I can get to it where I left off. As a matter of fact, since checking Wolfe out, I’ve read one other book, and I’m a third of the way through another (Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh).

But all of this didn’t stop me from popping in to pick up a copy of Steinbeck’s Cannery Row just now. I just needed a book with which I could lie on the grass and take in with just a little sleep on my mind. Something that could pretty much put me there, in the 30s. In the 40s. California coast. if I closed my eyes in a kind of half-dream state. Just down the hill and to the left, easy walking distance from where I actually worked for some years. Of course it’s nothing like the place described in the book now. I don’t get the feeling that a lot of tourists hit the spot back then. But I can almost see the bones of that which Steinbeck wrote if I look hard enough.

I like this kind of stuff, like I like wandering through the older country villages and towns of rural Korea. There’s a sense of the history of those places. No hurries. Interesting people. Interesting structures and sights. Trees. More authentic than the big city. I biked through Seoul just a few days ago, and of course I saw the sanitized version. But I also took a left that had me peddling through a graffitied neighborhood that wasn’t looking so nice, and I can’t help but think the whole place is a bit of a lie (like modern-day Cannery Row). I always thought it interesting when I met Koreans, most every one of whom would answer my question “where are you from?” with “Seoul.” I suspect they either didn’t want to explain that they were actually from a suburb, or they were outright being untruthful, thinking that “Seoul” was some kind of magical place that they wanted me to believe was their hometown.

So maybe libraries can take me to the quieter, slower life I want to live sometimes. When I take my lunchtime walk to check mail, I’m often drawn to the one here on base, right down the street and (mostly) on my way back. It’s like the manual version of surfing the web for me — nothing much to do, so I’ll just click on this for a quick read. But the read I’m doing is actually with my feet up and the book in my hands.

I was walking down that same stretch of road a few years back and someone actually commented on the book I was carrying. “Don’t see that too much anymore.” And, thinking about it, he was right. You might see a backpack on a student, but how often do you see anyone just walking down the street with a book? Maybe some people really don’t know enough to know what they’re missing…