Til now, I had never known love

This image is of the back of the stage at one end of the main room of The Antiquarium in Brownville, NE. Map cases. Art. Wood.

There are whole areas that smell vaguely of stained glass studio and a room with a typewriter from some time in the Dark Ages that my fingers twitched to touch, to use, to bring to life for them.

I did not buy anything. I took my father there on Sunday. He bought a 2 volume set of Plutarch's Lives. He told me that I had made an impression on my previous visit on the proprietor (a bare-foot and amiable Tom), who described me as self-affected (or -effected, I am not sure which). He continued to say that I knew what I wanted to do and didn't need anyone to help me. Wrapped in my tweed and scarf clutching scrap paper to my chest as a blanket, I believe the description is not unkind, but correct. My parents agree.

There is a kind of similarity about places and people who show love to each other through the medium of books. It is the spaces that I love: the specificity in a reading area; the smell of contemplation; the muffled sounds of trafficked floors and the deliberately random conversations. Everything you can see is alive in a place that loves the life of books and book-people. Every book is a conversation and when you open it at random or on purpose, the conversation invites response. It is the same with the people who care for collections of books.

There is a difference between a life that is spent living and one that is spent collecting. A room with a bunch of books is not the same as a room that is a library. I worked with books that were treated as objects, as commodity, and never could internalize it. Library is the world of books that makes sense to me. There is some kind of order, it doesn't even matter particularly what kind of order as long as order exists. Collections and sections exist, as to interactions between those collections and sections and their curators and their interactors. Intra-Library networks.

I love the smell of bookshelves. I love that I know someone who smells the differences in dust as chocolate or lemon custard. I love that I argue with someone about what exactly defines a library and that there is someone else whose definition matches mine exactly. I love that there is someone in this world whose life is like the one that I want to live.

That all paled the moment I walked fully into The Antiquarium. There is a soaring of spirit that happens with love. A kind of smile that is only partly on the lips, the rest of it living in lungs and spleen and leg muscles.  A challenge and contentment. The possibility of Life.

A beautiful thing about loving the spaces of books is the 's' at the end of the word. Plural. Unconfined. Possible.

I live in a town with a used book store like a used book store. It is jarring. I come from a city with two used book stores like libraries, the most comfortable and accommodating way stations for books and their likers and their lovers. A Novel Idea and Bluestem Books changed my way of thinking about bookshops entirely, and for the better. The Antiquarium showed me a way of my future.

It is good to fall in love again.

In honor of today’s adventures...

Old Style does go skunky. I know, I know, it seems a statement of the obvious condition of Old Style, but trust me, I know of what I speak.

After days of spending time wandering like Horace from one soft place to sit and read to another, finding the hammock again, getting run into by grasshoppers mistaking my skull for a bouncing board (maybe not mistaken, who knows?) and having quiet moments with the deer just beyond the fence, I ventured today into town with my mother. The objectives were simple enough: lunch with friends and then to the house to take care of some potentially loose ends in preparation for my eventual return.

Lunch was accomplished with grace and style and good conversation, followed immediately by plans for world domination and cheesecake. One of our number is not of age yet, so there was no rampant drinking to celebrate the event. Though we have been promised a Part II. I am hopeful. Full of hope.

Given my need to go to places I enjoy with frequency, I was fortunate to run into two of my acquaintance whereupon I was given hugs. I enjoy hugs from friends and will accept them with very little chagrin (most of the time) especially now as I have a reason to be hugged with abandon.

The time at spent at the library was filled with pleasant conversation with understanding folks. It's always a crapshoot when you go to the library hoping to see certain people, because you never know who will or won't be on the schedule for that day. Much like Lincoln bar life. There are certain people who are always out. And then there are the people you want to see. It's a crapshoot. Opportunities abound and it pays to listen to the people who know what and where they are. Received a gift of unexpected kindness. Still reeling from that, but I will recover.

And then there was the adventure of the key. I now have a copy of the key to the back door of the house. I am pleased about this on many levels. Except. The part where my mother's car decided that it didn't want to let her turn the key in the ignition. Many many phone calls were made. And then: the mechanic at the service station suggested that she hit the key with a shoe.

You can imagine the mirth. Particularly because it worked. The Shoe Solution.

The end of the day involved a trip to the grocery store for wine and garlic (mother outside with the car running. just in case) and now the wait as meat and potatoes cook and we drink well-earned glasses of wine after a day that will be followed by two days of rest and light reading.

I define light reading as The Muqaddimah by Ibn Kahldun. An Introduction to History. He likes Bedouins. I do, too.