Caution: LIbrary Lust

The run begins with a bowl of cereal and a dash of dread. Today’s experience entails more swim than run given New England’s soupy air. It’s 5.30am and it’s as hot and humid as the bowels of a stovetop steamer. I run past wooden ships and riverside cottages and beautifully imperfect lawns and could care less about the sun. A full glorious hour, legs weighted down by imaginary dive belts - past the purple and white one room cottage, under the rusted bridge, alongside the broad woman who walks her small dogs with the velocity of a crock pot, eventually overtaken by the lean nylon clad cyclist with his daily, personalized weather report. Pretty moist today! he trails off, Good thing we got out early! The river road winds its way toward the Atlantic and I breathe and nod in agreement.

Research at the aging library later that day is productive and I cherish my space in the back corner of this magical brick building among the books on maritime history, murder on the high seas, and cartographies aplenty. I’m gleefully click clack click click clack clack-ing my fingertips across the keyboard when a man trudges past the book stacks, drops his heavy bag to the seat, and pops out his cellular phone. At quick glance, he has curly hair of the salt and pepper variety, ropey frame, creased face, a newer, New England sailor.

Yes, hello, listen, I can’t really talk, because I’m at the library, but I need a flight on American from Boston to Milan.

Momentary silence. Then he laughs at something the American Airlines rep says. I chide myself for being too easily distracted. You’re here to work, KB, I remind myself. Unlike the cell phone intruder.

Well, my wife is in Milan and I’m in the US but there’s a bit of an emergency, he offers, in a strangely boastful kind of way. I’m a writer, he adds.

Something tells me he offered this last morsel of information voluntarily.

Well, she actually fell out of a window, he explains. His inflection is...proud. Indeed, it's a newsworthy piece of information.

How many of us can say that? I muse. Besides, this interruption has now become a welcome break from a writing project with a deadline so insolent it insults the meaning of Summer.

I soon learn that Sailor’s wife had locked her keys out of their villa, and was climbing into the second story window to save from breaking glass, when she plummeted to the ground. But she’s all right, Sailor assures the agent, who proceeds to find him an airline seat for a screaming deal.

Soon a librarian glides past Sailor’s chair and approaches his desk. She is tall and angular, with straight, shoulder length blond hair and the look of a Manhattan girl, perhaps 50, slightly sleepy in the eyes. She touches his shoulder and asks:

So is your wife all right? They apparently know one another.

Sailor explains that she’ll be fine.

You know, she offers. I hope one of my former lovers will fly across the ocean to rescue me someday.

My goodness! I think. I’m in the library. But it’s a beautiful delivery, and I’m both aghast and delighted that she’d compromise the sanctity of this sacred space with such downright fun.

Sailor confides: I can be your lover. I can almost hear him smiling. His wife fell out a window, and he is in the library, flirting with a city girl. Is this really happening, these people living their lives out loud?

The librarian laughs, and suddenly the man’s phone rings. He answers, and while the caller’s identity is unclear, his refrain may be heard: Listen, I can’t talk, I’m at the library…

I’m in a time loop, and it’s my cue to leave. He just wants to tell his story, I think. So many of us just want to tell our stories.

So I close the laptop and pack a bag full of manuscripts and books, and stroll past these two future lovers and down the spiral stairs to my own destiny, which awaits me in a white cottage built in 1870.

Who doesn’t love New England?