I may be adding things. It’s been years now, and nearly every day I dream up my hours and meetings with James Carlson Sweatt. I am a librarian, and you cannot stop me from annotating, revising, updating. I like to think that — because I am a librarian — I offer accurate and spurious advice with no judgment, good and bad next to each other on the shelf. But my memories are not books. Blessing if they were. Then maybe someone would borrow one and keep it too long and return it, a little battered, offering money for my forgiveness, each memory new after its long absence.
My memories are not books. They are only stories that I have been over so many times in my head that I don’t know from one day to the next what’s remembered and what’s made up. Like when you memorize a poem, and for one small unimportant part you supply your own words. The meaning’s the same, the meter’s identical. When you read the actual version you can never get it into your head that it’s right and you’re wrong.
What I give you is the day’s edition. Tomorrow it may be different.
I lived then, as now, in Brewsterville, an unremarkable little town on Cape Cod. Brewsterville lies halfway up the spit curl of the Cape, not close enough to the rest of the world to be convenient nor far enough to be attractively remote. We get tourists who don’t know exactly what they’ve come out to see. Now we have little to show them: a few places that sell homemade jelly, a few guest houses, a small stretch of beach on the bay side. Our zoning laws keep us quaint, but just.
Once we had more. We had James Carlson Sweatt walking the streets. Some people came out specifically to visit James; some came for the ocean and happened upon him, more impressive than the ocean because no philosopher ever wonderingly addressed him, no poet compared him to God or a lover’s restless body. Moreover, the ocean does not grant autographs. James did, politely, and then asked how you were enjoying your visit.
Everyone knew him as The Giant. Well, what else could you call him? Brilliant, maybe, and handsome and talented, but doomed to be mostly enormous. A painter, an amateur magician, a compulsive letter-writer, James Carlson Sweatt spent his life sitting down, hunching over. Hunching partly because that’s the way he grew, like a flower; partly to make him seem smaller to others. Five feet tall in kindergarten; six foot two at age eleven. He turned sixteen and hit seven-five the same week.
The town’s talking about building a statue to honor James, but there’s a lot of bickering: for instance, what size? Life-sized puts it at about the same height as the statue of the town founder, who’s life-and-a-half. Some people claim it’ll attract tourists, who even now take pictures in front of the founder. Others maintain that tourists will take a picture of any old thing. “Who’s this behind me?” a lady tourist asks her husband, who is intent on his focusing.
“Pilgrims,” he answers.
For some people, history is simply what your wife looks good standing in front of. It’s what’s cast in bronze, or framed in sepia tones, or acted out with wax dummies and period furniture. It takes place in glass bubbles filled with water and chunks of plastic snow; it’s stamped on souvenir pencils and summarized in reprint newspapers. History nowadays is recorded in memorabilia. If you can’t purchase a shopping bag that alludes to something, people won’t believe it ever happened.
Librarian (like Stewardess, Certified Public Accountant, Used Car Salesman) is one of those occupations that people assume attract a certain deformed personality. Librarians are supposed to be bitter spinsters; grudging, lonely. And above all stingy: we love our fine money, our silence.
I did not love fine money: I forgave much more than I collected. I did not shush people unless they yelled. And though I was technically a spinster, I was bitter only insofar as people made me. It isn’t that bitter people become librarians; it’s that being a librarian may turn the most giving person bitter. We are paid all day to be generous, and no one recognizes our generosity.
As a librarian, I longed to be acknowledged, even to be taken for granted. I sat at the desk, brimming with book reviews, information, warnings, all my good schooling, advice. I wanted people to constantly callously approach. But there were days nobody talked to me at all, they just walked to the shelves and grabbed a book and checked out, said, at most, thank you, and sometimes only you’re welcome when I thanked them first. I had gone to school to learn how to help them, but they believed I was simply a clerk who stamped the books.
All it takes is a patron asking. And then asking again. A piece of paper covered with notes, the pencil smudged: a left-hander (for instance, James) will smudge more. The patron you become fond of will say, I can’t believe you have this book. Or even better (believe it or not) you don’t own this book — is there a way I can get it?
Yes.
Even at age eleven, twelve, James asked me how to find things in the catalog. He told me of books he liked, wanting something similar. He recognized me as an expert. Despite popular theories, I believe people fall in love based not on good looks or fate but on knowledge. Either they are amazed by something a beloved knows that they themselves do not know; or they discover common rare knowledge; or they can supply knowledge to someone who’s lacking. Hasn’t anyone found a strange ignorance in someone beguiling? An earnest question: what day of the week does Thanksgiving fall on this year? Nowadays, trendy librarians, wanting to be important, say, Knowledge is power. I know better. Knowledge is love.
People think librarians are unromantic, unimaginative. This is not true. We are people whose dreams run in particular ways. Ask a mountain climber what he feels when he sees a mountain; a lion tamer what goes through his mind when he meets a new lion; a doctor confronted with a beautiful malfunctioning body. The idea of a library full of books, the books full of knowledge, fills me with fear and love and courage and endless wonder. I knew I would be a librarian in college as a student assistant at a reference desk, watching those lovely people at work. “I don’t think there’s such a book—” a patron would begin, and then the librarian would hand it to them, that very book.
Unromantic? This is a reference librarian’s fantasy.
A patron arrives, says, Tell me something. You reach across the desk and pull him toward you, bear hug him a second and then take him into your lap, stroke his forehead, whisper facts in his ear. The climate of Chad is tropical in the south, desert in the north. Source: 1991 CIA World Factbook. Do you love me? Americans consumed 6.2 gallons of tea per capita in 1989. Source: Statistical Abstract of the United States. Synecdoche is a literary device meaning the part for the whole, as in, the crowned heads of Europe. I love you. I could find you British Parliamentary papers, I could track down a book you only barely remember reading. Do you love me now? We own that book, we subscribe to that journal, Elvis Presley’s first movie was called Love Me Tender.
And then you lift the patron again, take him over the desk and set him down so gently he doesn’t feel it, because there’s someone else arriving, and she looks, oh, she looks uninformed.
He became a regular after that first school visit, took four books out at a time, returned them, took another four. I let him renew the magic book again and again, even though the rules said one renewal only. Librarians lose reason when it comes to the regulars, the good people, the readers. Especially when they’re like James: it wasn’t that he was lonely or bored; he wasn’t dragged into the library by a parent. He didn’t have that strange desperate look that some librarygoers develop, even children, the one that says: this is the only place I’m welcome anymore. Even when he didn’t want advice, he’d approach the desk with notes crumpled up, warm from his palm, his palm gray from the graphite. He’d hold it out until I grabbed the wastebasket by its rim, swung it around and offered it; his paper would go thunking in.