Gazing out the coffee shop window, I look past a flower box full of watermelon-colored petunias to the public library across the street. I spent countless childhood hours there, curled up in a big leather chair reading Mrs. Piggle Wiggle’s Magic, books of science experiments, and biographies, especially about Abraham Lincoln.
I also ventured into gloomy stacks of the adult mystery section, tip-toeing along shelves of volumes that held horrible secrets of untimely death and clever murders. Every week I loaded my grandmother's finished books into the basket of my blue Schwin bicycle and pedaled to the library. After piling them on the “returns” counter, I slipped into the darkness and pulled new titles at random, delivering them to my grandmother who would have already read at least ten. But that left ten more to keep her going until the following week.
Today, the outside of the library looks as it always did; it is the inside that has changed. Formal carpet has replaced worn wooden floors. Computers line up on marble counters where the card catalogue once stood. Instead of a slightly dowdy grandmotherly type looking down at me as I walked around her tall desk, asking if she could help, a man wearing black suspenders, expensive gray slacks, and a starched white shirt with French cuffs held around his wrists with gold and black cufflinks sat at the information center, intent on his computer screen.
Can one be nostalgic for things one wishes had been as well as for what was?
My heart hurts with memories and unrealized expectations because I am in transition, working in a coffee shop instead of my small home office decorated like a porch on a Cape Cod beach house. Recently returned from an academic year as a resident scholar at The Collegeville Institute in Minnesota, I am staying with my elderly father while looking for a job that will allow me to rent a place I can make into home. Relationships have changed. Like the library, I am not quite the same on the inside, and I wonder when I will feel comfortable with my updated self.
I also ventured into gloomy stacks of the adult mystery section, tip-toeing along shelves of volumes that held horrible secrets of untimely death and clever murders. Every week I loaded my grandmother's finished books into the basket of my blue Schwin bicycle and pedaled to the library. After piling them on the “returns” counter, I slipped into the darkness and pulled new titles at random, delivering them to my grandmother who would have already read at least ten. But that left ten more to keep her going until the following week.
Today, the outside of the library looks as it always did; it is the inside that has changed. Formal carpet has replaced worn wooden floors. Computers line up on marble counters where the card catalogue once stood. Instead of a slightly dowdy grandmotherly type looking down at me as I walked around her tall desk, asking if she could help, a man wearing black suspenders, expensive gray slacks, and a starched white shirt with French cuffs held around his wrists with gold and black cufflinks sat at the information center, intent on his computer screen.
Can one be nostalgic for things one wishes had been as well as for what was?
My heart hurts with memories and unrealized expectations because I am in transition, working in a coffee shop instead of my small home office decorated like a porch on a Cape Cod beach house. Recently returned from an academic year as a resident scholar at The Collegeville Institute in Minnesota, I am staying with my elderly father while looking for a job that will allow me to rent a place I can make into home. Relationships have changed. Like the library, I am not quite the same on the inside, and I wonder when I will feel comfortable with my updated self.