The faint vanilla smell of a library
Running fingers lightly over the tops of books
Looking at titles and covers
Hoping to fall in love
A purple cover and an arresting title
Pulled off the shelf, the first page read
Then pages start turning as fast as eyes can read
Soon unaware of anything, except the story
And a boy reading in the library
Unites the generations
Travels time and space
And expands his own mind
While sitting quietly on the floor
I lay crossways on the backseat
of my father’s Volkswagen Type 3
reading “The Melted Coins”
a book I had just purchased
in North Chili New York
with a flimsy pillow beneath my back
and a lonely feeling
from this being
our first family vacation without
either my brother or my sister
who had grown up
and moved out
and I noted that
the original “Melted Coins”
had been about pirates
and tattoo parlors
and this ‘updated’ one
was about the theft of tribal mask
from a Native American tribe
and I thought my brother
would find that very funny
but he wasn’t there
the book was new and smelled like a new book
and I remember the smell of my father’s car
driving through Pennsylvania countryside
headed back home
I loved these books when I was young,
The thought of fighting crime;
And in them, traveled ’round the world
And decades back in time
I loved to solve each mystery
To defend right and truth;
As Frank and Joe became my friends
And I became a sleuth
And with these two friends by my side
We faced a thousand scrapes:
For every mystery we solved
There were six great escapes
We helped out old man Applegate,
We went to Baffin Bay;
But some there are who still don’t know
The force of child’s play
To read and to imagine is
Our powers to extend –
For us to become anything
At first, we must pretend
