E is for Everyone
What do you expect? It is, after all, a public library. This
is the place that is who we are as much as any. As we are
without, so we are within. Literally and figuratively. The library
is a wild garden, tended, yes, but with deference to what chooses
to grow there, a nurtured microcosm of a more feral whole.
Each room is a menagerie of thousands of multicolored spines
arranged in the unruly lines that Dewey set forth,
to be happened upon, or sought. Selected or not. A democracy
of plantings to be put to use or left fallow. Thousands of hands reaping and sowing.
This place is a great compendium, an anthology of our community,
separate stories, shared histories, questions with answers and without.
Titles that stand on their own occasionally combined in a patrons arms
form new poetry: The Poke Cake Cookbook, Becoming, Geek Dad,
The Princess Saves Herself in this One...
We are in the pulsing heart of the chaotic, conflicted
body politic where you are as likely to find Rush Limbaugh as Rumi.
In fact, this place is its own story woven of the stories we bring. For me,
the sanctuary where I brought my children when I was recently divorced, so poor
that I couldn't afford cable, and terrified that I didn't know how
to parent alone. What do you do when you realize the apartment
you share with your only two treasures has become the box
you don't know how to escape? You find the place with many doors.
Years later, and we still return to this place like a home town
made of familiar avenues, open spaces, neighbors, and new construction.
This is the place where we find ourselves reflected and others introduced.
The library is not mine defined, but ours unedited. Inhabited
by the homeless mother, the professor, the mechanic,
the knitter, the immigrant, the drag queen, the child,
the patriot and the activist. The broken and repaired. Us.
Not by consensus, but through the challenging confluence
of our geography. The terrible, beautiful force of shared space.
The parts of our hearts that we run from or chase.
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