Amazing, some time to mess around. Let’s use it to admit we moved to New York.
Because I’m the emotional equivalent of a rain soaked chihuahua with zero tolerance for change [despite how often I subject myself to it], it’s taken a *hair* under nine months for me to admit that I did, in fact, decide to live here. And the inciting incident for me to look myself in the eye in my appropriately crowded bathroom mirror was not when the titanium riddling my leg set off the metal detector at the DMV while on my way to surrender my out of state license. And it was not spending all summer updating my address to my local P.O Box for official-spectrum communications. And it was not existing gleefully among other cast off shades as we haunted the cemetery that is a college town in early July. It wasn’t even getting in-state healthcare.
Yesterday, leaving my local library with my plastic ticket to books I can’t hoard, sealed for me that I am [however temporary this phase might be] no longer a citizen of the petulant little rock state that spat me out.
Some civic institutions I participate in because it’s get with the program, or get off the stage. Without a driver’s license and electricity my goals would become unachievable to impossible. Other civic institutions [and it’s my belief that libraries are the pinnacle of the institutions which an organized human group cobbles together], I elect to participate in without obligation or consequence [except maybe late fees]. Walking up to the front desk of my local library, signing up for a library card, and promptly checking out a book that depressed me for hours, is a voluntary submission an entirely optional civic institution that just makes life livable and better. I’ve passed the point of participating for the sake survival, and am now participating for quality of life. Meaning I’ve got roots down. Meaning [*shudder*] I live here.
Your honor, yes, that is my library card. I confess. I’m an upstate New Yorker. I submit myself to the will of the jury.
Granted, this thought-meander may not be applicable to people who had normal hobbies as kids. At least sixty percent of my personality was spawned by my mother habitually turning me loose in a relatively small, consistently organized library before I could read. Consciously observing my own early childhood developmental milestones when returning over and over again to the same books- first only able to look at pictures, then puzzling out words, then reading them to myself, secretly, silently, hours passed bedtime- was and is likely to blame for my obsessive, introverted, fantastical, curiosity driven projects, musings, and other grey-area artsy shit.
[Mom, don’t be mad. That’s a “Thank You”. A weird one, but I’m trying].
By the way, it was this book:
And we all lived happily ever after.
Susanna F. Barger 