[Day 7]

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Well, they are.

My mother tells me that, as a girl, she spent a lot of time at the public library, because (a) it was safe, and (b) it was quiet. My mom is the thirteenth of fifteen children, born into hunger level poverty, so both of those things were in short supply.

We moved a few times when I was a kid, and I remember the public libraries in each place. In addition, we had school libraries and even a meaningful church library or two thrown in there.

My favorite two of all those libraries were the two where we lived starting (for me) at age 10. My hometown library was my favorite, and made summers bearable. The next town over had just built a new one (pictured) and I used it, too.

When you move to a new town or neighborhood, you typically don’t have friends there. It’s quite a change for kids, particularly when you are used to having lots of them where you moved from. This was the situation my sister, brother and I were in the summer of 1972. My brother was starting high school with summer band though, and my sister was at the same high school she’d been at, and could drive.

I knew no one, and was going to be starting 5th grade at a new school that fall.

My first visit to the town library was our first full week in our new (to us) house. My mom, who taught school and so was home for the summer, took me to explore.

The library was in a very nondescript one story building. No fancy landscaping or architecture.

The children’s books were second thing on the right as we entered, just past the checkout desk. I realized within seconds I’d just entered a gold mine. For this library had the thing I was most looking for, yet couldn’t find in book stores: old books.

I think my love of old books started the prior year, when our teacher read us the first of the Laura Ingalls Wilder books. I realized that kids of my parent’s or grandparent’s times had led totally different types of lives, which I found fascinating. Before radio, television, or electric power in houses. Or maybe just before television, but, radically different than I knew.

I wanted more of that, and here it was.

My mom also found some books she wanted, and, after getting library cards, we were able to exit with a decent first haul. And the two week time to return meant a guaranteed trip back.

Libraries are magical for lots of reasons, of course. One of them is that we build monuments to those things we think are most important. When a child knows there are always collections of books available for borrowing, no matter where the family moves to, she or he knows society values books. The library in the next town over seemed like a palace to me, and there is magic in being someplace important — one that, as adults, we lose sight of, until maybe we feel it again by going somewhere famous.

Schools. Libraries. Football fields. Public pools. Grocery stores. Restaurants. As a kid, these are all magic. I see infants looking around in wonder in grocery stores, while their unnoticing parents hurriedly gabble away on their phones, oblivious to the sheer sort of ecstasy going on a few inches away.

Which is a shame, really.

When I went to visit my mom in Arizona last month, she took me to the library of the Assisted Living facility she lives in. They have newspapers, books, and magazines, and a computer memory game they’re all encouraged to play daily. So we did, together, laughing through much of it.

Old age and Parkinson’s are serious things, as is facing it with her children thousands of miles away. But my mom and I were back in a library, and the magic still happens there, just like it did forty-six years ago for a ten year old boy trying to fit into a new neighborhood, and just like it was for a little girl 30 years before that, trying to escape poverty and chaos.

Libraries are magic, magical monuments erected to something sacred, a chance to communicate directly with our own past. If we become too disconnected from the past, feeling it has nothing left to teach us, we lose the ability to focus even on the present. To truly know where we are, we must remember where we came from.

For if we forget that, the only monuments left will be monuments to ignorance.

And we can’t afford any more of those.

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Photo credit : Niceville Public Library. 19–. Black & white photonegative. State Archives of Florida, Florida Memory. Accessed 20 May. 2018.

30 Days of writing prose, day 30.

I made it.

{Whew.}

I’ve written both stories and essays during this last 4 weeks and 2 days. I go to the gym many mornings, and while I’m there, ideas for poems start lining up in my head, but I’ve had to push them aside.

Not, now. Be patient. I’m going to need all of you pretty soon.

My favorite essayist, in terms of the amount of time I spent reading his essays, was the famed science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov. In his essays, he wrote mostly on actual scientific subjects, but he also wrote on a wide variety of other topics, and I always found him engaging, informative, and entertaining. He also made writing essays look easy.

It is not easy, for the record.

In the world of short stories, I’m not sure who my favorite practitioner has been; it may very well be Sherwood Anderson, since both the Winesburg, Ohio collection and the short stories in Death In The Woods and Other Stories are among the most memorable ones I ever read. I don’t know that people read Sherwood Anderson much anymore, but he was brilliant, in my view.

F. Scott Fitzgerald was another author whose short stories I really liked; I can’t figure out if people really read him these days (other than Gatsby) or just make up quotes and attribute them to him. “Bernice Bobs Her Hair”, “The Ice Palace”, and “The Diamond as Big As The Ritz” being the most memorable of his stories to me, but several others also standing out in my memory.

My life being what it is, reading time is hard to come by. In recent years, except for reading books written by fellow bloggers*, I am much more likely to use Audiobooks. But I have bought some books of essays and short stories there, so I am continuing to explore new (to me) authors, albeit slowly.

I have thought, now that I am going back to poetry, about doing some spoken word poetry, but I despise the sound of my own voice.

Truly. Despise.

But, starting tomorrow, it’s back to poetry for me.

Thank heaven.

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* Like this one, and this one, and this one, and this one, and this one…

I recently was adding up the number of things I know about food, arriving eventually at the figure “zero”. I am, therefore, a stranger in a strange land when it comes to why cooks do the things they do.

For instance, garnishes mystify me. Why parsley is ever on a plate is beyond my ability to comprehend. I’m also not sure why the chef at the B&B that served us the breakfast pictured above ever ended his internal monologue with, “… and, three and a half a strawberries should do it. Perfect.”

I don’t get it.

I mean, If like I strawberries at all, I want a whole number of them. Using fractional strawberries is just baffling.

Now, SOME of you (and you know who you are) are thinking, “I’ve seen photos of you, Owen. One thing you obviously know about food is WHERE CONSUMABLE FORMS OF IT ARE LOCATED. So, that’s more than zero things.”

That would be fair. I do eat. However, more than one person has told me in real life that I seem to frequently prefer “bad” to “good” food, indicating some sort of negative knowledge on my part. For instance, I might prefer a prepackaged, preservative-laden apple turnover to a freshly baked one. Or the local brand factory-produced potato chips to store-cooked ones that are made onsite.

I am assured, therefore, that while I obviously miss very few meals (and seem to have a few extra ones thrown in there) that my knowledge of the difference in good and bad when it comes to cooking is so faulty as to count against me.

(Notice that I am not even talking about the health-conducive properties of food here, which I also know nothing about, but which the Beautiful One knows a great deal about, as she attempts to steer me around things like apple turnovers and potato chips.)

One of my best and oldest friends has spent his whole life in the food business, as a waiter, chef, manager, general manager, and even restaurant owner, starting all of that in his mid-teens. He loves feeding people, loves the artistry of it. I have enjoyed meals that he has prepared or overseen for 40 years, but I haven’t really learned anything about it.

But I’m glad that there are people, like him, who do know about it. Everything good in this world is kept alive by those who love it enough to learn everything about it they can. Whether it is cooking or music, carpentry or sign painting, the world is a better place for people who DO care.

And who understand that extra half of a strawberry.

 

 

 

 

 

I read in a book that words of affirmation are a way of showing love. So now I walk around all day aggressively shouting, “OK, SURE, RIGHT!”

People don’t seem to find it all that affectionate.

I think “words of affirmation” are what used to be called compliments. I’ve always had a love-hate relationship with compliments. It reminds me of a cheer my old high school cheerleading squad used to do:

WHAT DO YOU WANT?
COMPLIMENTS!
BUT WHO DOESN’T WANT ‘EM?
INTROVERTS!

In the dating world, boys will often attempt to impress girls using either compliments or flattery. Compliments and flattery are similar, as they involve employing the exact same words to convey the exact same praise — only with flattery, the person who said the words didn’t actually mean them, which turns out to be problematic.

In short, compliments are good, flattery is bad, and good luck, girls (or boys), in telling them apart.

I remember when I first tried using a carefully prepared compliment as part of the dating ritual. It was homecoming dance my senior year in high school.

Me (standing at door while beautiful girl in elegant gown comes into view): I… wow. I totally forgot what I had prepared to say.

Her: Now, that’s a compliment.

Sometimes, incompetence works in your favor.

I briefly dated a professional actress while I was in college. She liked compliments, particularly (in defiance of stereotype) giving them. This was an interesting type of role reversal, as I was the one trying to figure out if she really liked me or was just feeding me lines…

… then I suddenly remembered I was shallow and was fine with it either way.

I did eventually get over being shallow. Mostly.

Compliments are often things people wish they’d heard from one or more of their parents. My parents were from the generation that didn’t believe in using compliments. They believed in stockpiling them, you know, in case of nuclear war. There’s a whole collection of unspoken, unused compliments in a cellar somewhere in Florida, I’m pretty sure.

I’m always interested in what people choose to compliment others on. Like, I’ll see kids playing, and four people will tell one of the little girls how pretty she is, and I’ll be thinking, “have you seen how fast her reflexes are? She should be in MMA…”

And so I’ll say so.

Much to her parents horror.

I complimented my nephew recently on how good he was at making everyone feel welcome, right after about fifteen people had complimented him on losing weight. His wife complimented me on what a good job I did making sure kids didn’t get too close to the pool.

Now, THAT’s my kind of compliment. I am basically a sheepdog.

Compliments are fine when used in moderation, but if you experience dizziness or lack of vision after receiving one, see a doctor immediately.  As you can see above, I frequently have lack of vision, but that’s because of the hair in my eyes.

Oh, and by the way, you are by far my favorite reader. And I’m not just saying that.