On Losing and Finding a Home

We went to the downtown library.

We’re still in Columbus until Friday afternoon, watching my friend’s dog, but we don’t have money to do anything fun this time. We’re having our meals in the house and playing in the yard quite a bit. McFluff is actually hiding at Holly the witch’s house because this dog is a squirrel dog who wouldn’t be a very good housemate for a fat guinea pig. She puts him outside in her hens’ old brooding box every afternoon, where he eats his way through the clover, leaving zigzag tracks.

I was told there was a display of dinosaurs in the foyer of the main library downtown, and that was free. Adrienne has a friend just her age and on her exact neurodivergent wavelength who lives down the street from Holly the Witch, and the friend needed to check out new books from the library, so I offered a ride.

I am still getting used to driving in Columbus, though it’s a thousand times easier than driving in Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh is a compact triangle-shaped city and Columbus is a sprawling blob that gets bigger every year, but Columbus is laid out on a nice neat grid. The intersections in Pittsburgh are arcane hieroglyphs, but every intersection in downtown Columbus is a legible X. Every few blocks in Pittsburgh you have to duck under a tunnel or cross a terrifying suspension bridge; Columbus has fewer bridges, and the bridges are so squat it’s easy to imagine you’re still on a normal road. In Pittsburgh, if you forget your parking brake, you might roll backwards into a river because everything is on a sharp hill. In Columbus, there are hardly any hills. If you start driving on North High Street up by Whetstone park you can see for miles, all the way to the downtown skyscrapers. It’s easy to orient yourself.

Still, it’s something to figure out the traffic here.

I drove downtown with no more than the usual difficulty, following the monotone of my phone’s GPS, while the girls in the backseat chatted about Minecraft.

Have you ever been to the main library in Columbus, Ohio?

It’s just about the loveliest library I can imagine.

Coming in through the front door, you walk across a gallery with a very odd piece of modern art, a galaxy of giant bronze spheres hanging from the ceiling. When I was a child I would sprint across that gallery because I was afraid the spheres would fall down and crush me. Then you get to another giant room, an atrium three stories high, with a mural painted on the side of the staircase. To one side are the librarians at their desks and to the other is the children’s section. I used to love that children’s section. When I was a preschooler there were toys in one corner, a kitchen and a huge supply of realistic rubber food which I would cook and serve to imaginary guests for hours. Then, in the 90s, they put in computers with the brand new coveted CD ROM technology. I would play The Oregon Trail II and The Lost Mind of Doctor Brain while my father browsed the grown-up books upstairs. Now that computer games for children aren’t a novelty, the children’s section has comfortable chairs and a long bench shaped like a school bus.

My father used to take us to the library to enjoy the computers every Wednesday after daily Mass. Sometimes I got taken to the library to play on the computers when my behavior was considered too disgraceful to be present at those despised Charismatic prayer meetings. The library was a refuge from the fanatical madness.

I’ve missed it.

Adrienne’s friend made a bee line for a series of high fantasy novels and took out volumes three, four, six, seven, eight and nine.

“This will take me five days,” she explained. “But I have to find volume five.”

We went back out into the giant room, where there were three lifesized rubber dinosaurs on display. I asked the librarian about getting volume five delivered to the library branch closest to the little girl’s house, which she did. Librarians are magical people who know how to do everything.

I stood there for a minute, breathing in the smell of books, crying inside for everything that was good about a childhood that was far from good, wondering for the ten thousandth time what my life would be like if I had never heard of the Charismatic Renewal and had never, ever, ever lost my family to that madness, never come to Steubenville, never known what it was to be homesick in a place I don’t belong.

Then it was my turn at the librarian’s desk. “Could I… may I… I want to see about getting a library card? I don’t live in Columbus but I’m an Ohio resident and I come here every six weeks or so.”

I have, lately. I’ve been home every six weeks this summer and I want to keep that up if I can. Right now we don’t even know how we’ll pay rent on the hated house in Steubenville, but if there’s gas I can come see my new friends for the weekend whenever I can, for free.

The magic librarian granted my wish. I gave her my name and my contact information, and I found myself holding a slim plastic talisman.

Adrienne ran up and ducked under my arm just then. The children’s librarian who had been walking after her, asking if she needed any help with anything, laughed. We all laughed. Adrienne is wary of strangers.

“You know,” said her friend, “You walk past an average of thirty-five serial killers in your lifetime. Maybe that was one of them!”

“Only thirty-four to go!” I said, clutching my library card as if it was the most valuable thing in the world.

“You know,” said Adrienne’s friend, shouldering her book bag, “If you don’t have a card with you they can look you up in the system.”

I didn’t know how to explain that it’s not about the library system. It’s about losing and finding a home.

We drove back to Hungarian Village on that nice orderly grid with far too much traffic, chatting about serial killers.

Just for a moment, everything seemed possible.

image via Pixabay