It’s a holey whole hole
and it just - plain - isn’t
by David Benjamin
“For
one who reads, there is no limit to the number of lives that may be
lived, for fiction, biography, and history offer an inexhaustible number
of lives in many parts of the world, in all periods of time.”
― Louis L’Amour
TAIPEI
— Whenever I’m in one of these farflung outposts, I eventually turn to
myself indignantly and say, “Hey, Gomer! What the hell are you doing here?”
I
know it’s a lousy excuse, but I’m probably here because of the library.
In the little town where I grew up, it was the only place for miles and
miles around that could even be remotely regarded as a portal to the
world. I had no idea of its power. The library ruined me.
It
actually started with Dr. Seuss. One day, my first-grade teacher herded
her whole class down the hill to the Tomah Public Library, up the stone
steps, through the doors, where suddenly you could smell books like the
breath of ten thousand dead philosophers, and then down the wooden steps
to the “reading room” — I mean, what the hell was I doing there? I couldn’t read yet. And what’s a philosopher?
They
sat us down in front of a librarian, who read to me — well, us. But I
took it personally, because she was reading Dr. Seuss — Horton, Bartholomew or If I Ran the Zoo, one of those contagious concoctions of verbal melody and subversive fancy that whispered to me, “This is what you want to do.”
I do? Me?
Well,
I did. I started writing my first novel in third grade, but it wasn’t
exactly my idea. I was mimicking Beatrice Dwyer, classmate, nemesis and
sweetheart, who was writing stories and reading them aloud. I said,
“Wait a minute. I can do that.” So I did. Forever after. To my mother’s
chagrin.
By then, I’d made the library my refuge. Life elsewhere
in Tomah was small and hard — my parents busting up, Mom moving us
around, my sister Peg hogging the bathroom, other kids kicking my ass in
school, the TV on the fritz.
My library card, bent and
dog-eared, was my ticket out. Dark wood and a constant hush, except for
the creak in the staircase as you climbed, until the altar became
visible, librarian presiding with stamp and inkpad. More books than I
could ever read, but I could try. I squandered the shank of my childhood
in that bar, partly to escape my home, but mostly to discover — and
confirm with every book I read — that my destiny wasn’t Tomah at all,
but out there. Someplace else.
I escaped for a long stretch into
the lyrical South of Joel Chandler Harris. The drawl and blend,
peppered with apostrophes, in the voices of Uncle Remus, B’rer Rabbit,
B’rer Fox, B’rer Bear, challenged and captivated me. Harris has long
been a controversial figure — a white author exploiting the vernacular
of just-freed slaves and illiterate field hands, taking credit for their
rich oral tradition and the magic fables that sprang therefrom. But my
God, if no one capable of writing them down had listened to those
folktales, found a way to translate their dense and musical argot into
prose and share them with the world, what a loss to human culture— as
though The Iliad and The Odyssey had perished on Homer’s deathbed.
During
and after Uncle Remus, I prowled the library like Frank Buck in the
jungle. I harvested eight, ten books at a time, devouring and digesting
them, overnight. The first few times I appeared behind a stack of books
half my height, the librarian said, “Are you sure you want all these
books?” After a while, she understood, stamped the return date
(ironically, because I was supposed to keep them two weeks) and sent me
along. I was back the next afternoon.
I sailed the wine-dark sea
with Robert Lewis Stevenson and went beneath, at least once a year, with
Jules Verne. I read all the Landmark biographies, from Ben Franklin to
Bob Hope. I tramped the Yukon with Jack London and Dangerous Dan McGrew.
I spent Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo with General Doolittle and six
hellish months with Richard Tregaskis on Guadalcanal. When I read
Holling Clancy Holling’s classic history of a fictional snapping turtle,
Minn of the Mississippi, I fell in love with natural history and
checked out every field guide in the library, from bugs and arthropods
to birds, mammals, fish, trees, flowers and fungi, reptiles, amphibians,
cetaceans and crustaceans, including Pagoo, the hermit crab
immortalized by, yes! Holling Clancy Holling. I lived the life of an
otter, a cougar, a wolverine, a beaver and a wildlife photographer.
H.G.
Wells launched me into space years before Gagarin and Shepard got
there. Natty Bumppo led me through the Adirondack woods with
Chingachgook and Uncas, and Mark Twain led me away from them with a
blast of mockery. But Twain restored my wanderlust, with Tom and Huck on
Minn’s Mississippi. A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur’s Court made me a time traveler and sent me into the history stacks, where I stumbled across the inimitable Hans Zinsser — Rats, Lice and History — whereat, also, I became a lifelong disease buff.
As
a good Catholic, I knew my proper place of worship was St. Mary’s, up
on the hill. But I looked around the church, every day (I had to) —
whether I was in the pews, serving Low Mass or up in the loft singing
the High Mass Agnus Dei with my classmates — and there was damn little to read. The joint had no books.
Okay,
that’s not entirely accurate. Every Catholic church has three books, if
you count the hymnal in the pew. There’s the Bible, but only one copy,
it’s on the pulpit and you don’t dare borrow it. Finally, in St. Mary’s,
every kid shlepped around his (or her) Daily Missal, which you used to
follow along. It was “required reading,” so nobody actually read it. It
contained no adventures and scant romance. There appeared no pirates, no
prisons, no Indians, cowboys, soldiers, gangsters, no jungles, no
mountains, no guns, not even any missiles, in the Daily Missal.
Which
is why inexorably, irreversibly, the Tomah Public Library supplanted
St. Mary’s as my place of worship. Because it had books, piles and piles
—
There’s this scene in Centerburg Tales. A story called
“Pie and Punch and You-Know-Whats” starts out with a mysterious figure
entering the lunchroom of Homer’s Uncle Ulysses. He deposits in the
jukebox a tune that he warns Homer to never play — which Homer and his
pal Freddy immediately play, turning all of Centerburg into a community
of compulsive crooners who can’t shake this contagious, maddening song
about the holey whole hole in a whole doughnut.
The library
looms as the town’s salvation when Homer recalls a book with an earworm
antidote, a tune in which you must “punch, brother, punch with care,
punch in the presence of the passenjare.” But Homer can’t remember
either title or author, only — vaguely — the color of the cover. And so,
a great, desperate, caterwauling throng descends upon the Centerburg
Public Library, yanking books from shelves, appalling the librarian
(until she starts singing, too!) and leafing frantically through every
blue-backed or brown-backed book in search of relief.
A towering
heap of discards accumulates, creating a scene the reader needn’t
imagine because the storyteller, Robert McCloskey, is also a crack
illustrator. When I was a kid, I lingered over that image — a mad Babel
of flying fiction and exhausted singers — and pictured myself leaping,
from the library balcony into that mountain of books.
An ocean,
rather, where a fervent reader could paddle and dive, drinking in a
paragraph, spitting out a pithy quote, spotting Moby Dick, frightening
Pagoo, peering through a porthole of the Nautilus, where Capt. Nemo
beckons me inside. Takes me around the world, 20,000 leagues or so, and
drops me off… where?
Taipei? Cool!
On the waterfront, if
they ask for a ticket, I reply, of course! Right here, in my Roy Rogers
wallet, bent and dog-eared, punched with care, hundreds of times,
60-odd years ago in a little brick building — still standing and full of
the world — in the 700 block of Superior Avenue.
Friday, April 21, 2017
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3 comments:
Oh my, you have truly joined the ranks of those who inspired you. Your “screeds” (like this one) if not an inspiration to the likes of me who cannot turn a phrase like you can, I can at least admire and almost always enjoy the impressive scale of your performance(s).
I assume this must be a lasting satisfaction to all artists (who have become expert at their craft like you have) to know you have at least given some pleasure to your audience however large or small or lasting – or fleeting in an unrecorded performance we would never know unless recorded or written down in some way somewhere, somehow, by someone (like Joel Chandler Harris, or Holling Clancy Holling, or you).
What a wonderful “Mess,” indeed, you have created (and for free on an almost somewhat regular basis). Thank you, thank you, Bravo!
Thank you for entertaining read, very enjoyable!
"And the beat goes on..." Love it.
Always a nice interlude in an otherwise demanding and stressful day (when I can actually decipher the gist of what you were saying or wrote about on that particular day).
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