Whatever that book was, I've long since forgotten.
I had walked to the library because the chain was loose on my bicycle, not an uncommon occurrence in those days. After poking around the poking around the children's book section and the record section for about an hour, I was ready to check out. (I got my initial education in Cream, Hendrix and Zeppelin from the vinyl record section of the Jett, Kan. Public Library.)
The record I checked out that day was different from my usual choices. It was a double disc filled with speeches by Bobby Kennedy. All I remember about that album now is going home,placing it carefully on the turntable and the analog reproductions of applause, cheers and hard Boston accent.
I didn't know much about him, but I would find out. Obviously John F. Kennedy was the one I would know more about, his being a President and all. There was a photograph of him near the office at Longfellow Elementary -- a picture I'd seen a million times, going back to Mrs. Alley's kindergarten class and before I knew who the man was and even noticed the picture in the first place.
"That's Kennedy," I remember my friend Myron telling me. Myron and I always played cowboy at recess.
This past school year, I'd finished fifth-grade in Mr. Turner's class. There was a slough of books on his shelves -- old books, paperbacks, pictureless hardbacks, dog-eared and bic-pen littered books. Books for children and adults. Mr. Turner was always trying to challenge you like that. One of those books, I remember, was To Seek a Newer World by Robert F. Kennedy.
a newer world
There was something in that for me. The world. Around the previous November when I was class helper for the week, I got to read my favorite "poem" from the class "language" book and I chose FDR's January 6, 1941 "The Four Freedoms" address before Congress.
The first is freedom of speech and expression -- everywhere in the world. The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way -- everywhere in the world...
So I checked out the record. There was a fiftyish woman in a black dress, smiling at me as Olivia, the twentysomething librarian, ran the packet card through the Big Machine.
Olivia was...if the words had existed in my vocabulary, I would have used such adjectives as "ebullient" and "effervescent" to describe her. She had black hair and olive skin, the beautifully genetic result, I'd later learn of the pairing of her mother, a Native Indian woman, ("Some of her sisters still read the Koran," she would tell me) and her father, a typical Southern man, now living in Virginia and working at the Pentagon. When their turn in the rotation came around, the couple team taught the adult Sunday School class at the suburban church they attended in Virginia.
Never, did Olivia question me or make me feel self-conscious about checking out adult books or asking the questions of the world that kids -- born and bred for baseball and after-game pizza parlors -- would care about.
Standing there, waiting for my turn to talk, and watching Olivia listen to the woman in the black dress, I knew she was really listening. Olivia could listen to you as if she were holding your hand even if she wasn't.
"There are so many things I wish I'd said before he got so frail," the woman said. "So many things I -- I felt like I needed to be forgiven for, but Daddy said he was the one who was sorry for not -- " she kept stopping to avert any outflow of emotion "being a more attentive father. All I ever wanted was my dad. Those times -- not like it happened a lot, but -- when he took me to work with him and held my hand -- it was downtown -- I felt so big."
Olivia was consoling without saying anything.
When I noticed the break and it looked like the conversation had ended, I asked Olivia if I could use the phone. (This was long before 10-year-olds had two cell phones on their persons.) "Can I call my grandma to ask her to pick me up?"
After hanging up the phone, the fiftyish woman in the black dress looked at me, smiling. "Do you know how happy your grandma is that you asked her to pick you up?"
"No," I replied nervously. Happy? I figured she'd feel put out that I was acting like a pest, asking her to drive over and get me when I could have easily walked over myself.
"You're making a lot of memories for you and your grandma."
I don't know why I remembered that all these years, I just did.
