Major Acid's E-Rag
Of Historical Interest
On a Winter's Day in the
Public Library
As teenagers go, she was a
little starker than most. Tall and almost skinny, wearing pale creams
and off-whites, she wore her hair short, unnaturally blonde, and spiky.
Her makeup, and there was lots of it, tended to the pale and accentuated
blush red circles around her eyes, like circles of blood, but painted in
non-threatening, even appealing pastels. She seemed sort of a reverse
goth.
Accompanied by several
teenage boys, she found her place at a table in the library. She had
their attention, not the least because she announced as soon as she sat
down that she could tie a cherry in a knot with her tongue, “Well, not
the cherry,” she corrected, “but the stem. I put the whole thing in my
mouth and out it comes all tied.”
To this boast, which
probably owes more to a current TV commercial than to any truth, the
best any of the boys could answer was, “Are you serious?”
No, I thought to myself, she
isn’t serious. She is playing with you and you are following along like
a herd of dimwitted sheep. As teen boys will, when their hormones begin
to control their brains, the group became annoyingly loud. Predictably,
they drew the attention of a librarian, a small, slim woman in a dark
green sweatshirt and wearing, incongruously, large, dark sunglasses. She
reminded me of the Man With No Eyes, the silent, vicious prison guard in
Cool Hand Luke who eventually shoots Paul Newman dead as much for his
smart mouth as for his escapes. She circled the group two or three
times, their noise level rising or falling in direct proportion to her
distance.
The young woman, meanwhile,
continued her role. She was a small town bad girl, holding court with
boys who wanted to be bad themselves, or perhaps to be men, yet didn’t
have any idea how to be either. Mostly they seemed to think it involved
a lot of swearing. Only one of the boys was on to her tricks. She toyed
with the rest, alternately insulting and cajoling, resorting to talk of
excessive alcohol and drugs and even suicide when the boys’ attention
wavered even for a moment. Finally, the librarian with no eyes passed
some invisible boundary line and en masse the group rose and departed.
The librarian looked over at me and smiled. We nodded at each other.
I sat back and considered
what I had just seen in the main branch of the Sudbury Public Library.
It is a pleasant space, open and brightly lit and suffused with the
quiet hum of ceiling fans. An odd place for what I had just watched,
except that this is a library next to a high school, and on this January
day it is cold outside. It is also a busy space. Scattered all around at
other tables, at study carrels, at computer desks, in amongst the
stacks, dozens of others young and old alike were pursuing their own
studies or research or recreation. Students worked quietly, for the
moment more concerned with schoolwork than their social world. A large
woman in a wheelchair was at the reference desk asking for help finding
something, while farther away, near the entrance and the full length
windows several young mothers with children were busy among the racks of
children’s books and toys available to them. A toddler made her way
carefully from the children’s area to the adult stacks and said in a
loud voice, “Daddy, I need you.” What she needed was a visit to the
washroom. On this clear, cold Monday afternoon in January, the library
was not a place one could fire a cannon through and not hit anyone.
That is a phrase that sticks
with me because it is a phrase I had to face a few years ago. It was a
phrase said in City Council as a justification for helping the Mayor and
his faithful fight spending so much as a single capital dollar on
improvements to Sudbury’s library system. The speaker said he had been
in the library and he could’ve fired that cannon. It wasn’t true then,
although there may have been fewer people in the library in those days.
The space then was smaller, less friendly, more dimly lit, the result of
tight budgets and political neglect for years. But it wasn’t true then
any more than it is true now.
For some four years a group
of serious, dedicated, occasionally argumentative and often exasperated
citizens laboured on the library Board to overcome that cannon and other
weaponry that came our way from the political world. But that group and
many other interested people persevered, and the city is the better for
it. An entire new branch was built in New Sudbury, and the main branch
was revived. Did it cost money? Yes. Was it worth it? Yes.
I have lived mostly out of
the city for more than two years now, but in that time I have developed
an even greater appreciation for libraries and for the benefits given to
the city by that particular group of citizens. Much of that time I was
in Jeddah, a Saudi Arabian port city on the Red Sea, a city awash in oil
money and a city without a public library. Often I passed a large board
sign that declared a patch of brown dirt beneath it as the site of a
future library, but when I left nearly two years later, that sign was
still there and so was the dirt. In the school I taught in, all the boys
in grades seven through twelve had to make do with a library smaller
than the office of Sudbury’s mayor. What was there was limited. Books on
biology or health had all the graphics of women and references to
forbidden subjects like “dating” either cut out or blotted out with a
black felt pen, the mark of the Saudi censor. This was not lost on my
students.
Many of them just wanted to
look at the pictures, of course. Saudi teenage boys have the same
hormones burning up their systems as Canadian teens. Still, if Jeddah
ever sees that public library, and even if the censor misses a book here
and there, no Saudi boys will be found sitting at a table being
whipsawed by a pale girl in odd makeup. The casual mixing of the sexes
is not allowed in the Kingdom. Although I suspect that some in the
‘enlightened’ western world may think that is actually a good thing, it
isn’t.
Learning how to deal with
the opposite sex takes practice, and the teen years are the practice
years. Some learn the lessons well, some poorly, some not at all, but
think of what it must be like not even to have the chance. A library is
not the only place for such lessons, or even the best place perhaps, but
it is a safe place. It is even a place where boys and girls sometimes
come together to study. Sometimes. At other times they play.
An older man appeared,
mid-forties perhaps, his collar-length hair and his chin-only beard
going to gray. He sat where the teens had, and when a middle-aged woman
joined him a few minutes later, the two got down to serious work. The
man was learning how to read. With difficulty he sounded out his lesson
in a low but steady voice, struggling over words with two syllables,
persevering with occasional encouragement from his tutor.
It is easy to think how
great the differences must be between the world that man lives in and
the one those students live in. But it isn’t that different. Television
surely provides them a link, although likely they watch different shows.
Politics affects each of their lives, but equally likely the old and the
young alike ignore politics. The library provides a link, too, a public
space of warmth and light and safety. That small group of people who
worked so hard to create that space can take a measure of pride in the
result.
I thought about that for a
few moments before returning to my own work. The man struggled on,
though not loudly enough to draw the attention of the woman with no
eyes. This is the kind of thing that annoys teenagers, who are prone to
making claims of unfair treatment. Mind you, the patient woman sitting
beside him didn’t open the proceedings with the declaration that she
could tie a knot in a cherry stem with her tongue. Who knows what kind
of reaction that might have produced.
