Library Walls
I
plop myself down into the “adult seat” in the pre-K children’s wing of the library. Already, boys in khaki cargo pants and girls
in sweet polka dot and heart-splattered dresses and tights bounce and waddle
back and forth across the playtime rug in the middle of the floor. Glancing at
the alphabet blocks that are stitched into the fabric of the rug, I remember a
poem about forgetting the alphabet in a kindergarteners’ classroom, and I
quickly eye each little toddler for any sign of trouble. No one is choking. No one is fighting. What else can I expect? “Little angels,” my coworker calls them. She’s the kind of lady where everything
reflects her religion in some way.
Whenever she says something like that, I always want to point to the
bottom of my mud-clad, grass-smeared rain boot and ask her how that points to
her beliefs, but I never do.
I grip a thick classic in between my two hands. I carry it around to look smart. Strangers and other high-schoolers that see me with it glance down at the book in my hand, and immediately their eyes widen and the most splendid mix of respect, honor, and bewilderment befall them. Names like Tolstoy and Orwell, Wells and Austen are never too far away from me, but still, they mean nothing. I hide a cheap paperback novel in my backpack for my actual enjoyment.
My mind wanders away as I watch the children placed under my “responsible adult” care. Around the coloring table, chubby hands grip at blunt crayons and clumsily, almost pathetically, fold stark white paper into crinkled, flightless airplanes. A tubby boy with thick curly blonde hair that builds two inches onto the top of his head grips his plane and slings his arm over his shoulder and out in front of him. The airplane dives into the carpet as if falling from the sky into a vast maroon ocean. I leave my classic on the windowsill and stand to retrieve the airplane. I pick it up. “We can’t fly airplanes,” I say. My voice is obnoxiously high as I speak to him, and in reality, I’d rather show him how to throw the airplane rather than take it away, but airplanes will “poke eyes out”, and so they are rigorously outlawed.
The boy flashes blue eyes and a quivering lower lip, a tactic he keeps hidden for airplane confiscation. I ignore it and fold the airplane up and place it inside my classic. I sit back down, and he busies himself with toy cars.
A few minutes later, a girl trots up to me, her uneven pigtails alive with static from rolling somersaults (excuse me, practicing gymnastics) on the alphabet rug. Clutched between two flattened palms are ten books. I glance around for my coworker, begging with eyes for escape from an hour of “Mr. Toby ate jam. Mr. Toby likes jam”, but I find her with her legs crossed and nose in her son’s homeschool textbook.
My shoulders sag; I repeat an anthem of “I love children” to myself inside my mind, and scooch from my adult chair onto the floor in front of the reading pillows. The little girl falls into my lap without warning, and my thighs scream against the sudden weight.
“Okay!” I say with a large smile. I reach for the first book and open it up. “ ‘Why I am special’, ” I read. I struggle against the sarcasm oozing from my voice, and I swallow it down with a noisy gulp. “ ‘I am special because I wear what I want to. I am special because I can sing any song….’ ” I keep going, fluctuating my voice and stretching it for character voices and silly exclamations, but eventually, my throat burns with the repeated rhyme scheme and cliché monkey-bouncing, balloon-popping, kite-flying simplicity of children’s books. After the ten books originally thrust into my hands, and five more brought by the other preschoolers, the little girl jumps from my lap and runs for the toy figurines in the corner. She drags the box across the floor with her, and I remember a time when I used to toddle in the old after-school day care room at the past school campus. The dinosaur figurines—machine painted with claws, talons, teeth, and ravenous facial expressions—once stood at the very top of my list of favorite toys.
The little girl dumps the entire plastic box onto the maroon carpet, and the carpet is no longer just a carpet but a transformed jungle with purple leaves big enough to sleep on, green vines that hang from trees like pipe cleaners, and a giant block castle where the king of the dinosaurs makes his humble home. I pick up the plastic T-rex and I smile. I line up the raptors and pretend they are guards, but I lose my smile. They are only plastic. They don’t move. Their faces don’t change. The rug is a rug.
I glance up at the little girl. A T-rex and a stegosaur in each hand, she bounces them on their stubby fake legs. Her expressions are vivid, glaring, and her lips mouth little words. I glance at the scattered books and the pictures in them, at the stack of blocks the little girl had hastily set up. Suddenly, she knocks the two dinosaurs together, and the stegosaur flies through the air and smacks against one of the blocks. It tumbles over, and the girl leaves the stegosaur on its side. She grapples for another figurine, and it too squares off with the T-rex. One by one, two by two, the dinosaurs challenge the T-rex until, finally, the girl reaches for the first fallen stegosaur. It scoots slowly over the maroon carpet. It stares into the T-rex’s eyes, and then they clash. They fall back. They clash again. Over and over, the little girl slams the figurines together, and over and over they always fall back from each other. I gaze at the figurines, transfixed, amazed, because in her mind, they aren’t plastic.
One last time, the two clash again, and the T-rex bounces up and down from its side to its back to its other side, rolling fearsomely away from the battered stegosaur. The T-rex stays on its side, and the stegosaur dances up and down.
“What just happened?” I ask sweetly.
Surprise overtaking her, the toddler’s head shoots up to look at me from the dinosaur clutched in her sweaty hand. “The, the, uh, T-rex was means. He, he, uh, was, uh, he was, uh, mean, and so the other dinosaurs, uh, they didn’t like him!”
I nod, smiling broadly and unsurely at her incoherent speech. “Oh really? That’s cool!” Again my voice squeaks and rings obnoxiously.
She nods vigorously. “Yeah! And so, uh, so, uh, all the other, all the other dinosaurs didn’t like him, uh, and so, uh, they fought him! But he was, uh, mean! And only, uh, this one—!” she shoves the stegosaur into my fist, “—uh, could beat him!”
I take the stegosaur from her and stare down at its fake tail, fake face, fake head, and fake fierce look. I copy the scowl on the stegosaur’s face and squint at it menacingly. Then I set it down.
“No!” the little girl shouts, and she snatches it off the alphabet rug. “He can’t goes over there! He, he, he’ll get hurt!”
“Oh, sorry,” I say hastily, glancing slyly at the alphabet rug. Was it lava? A lake? My eyes wander around its border, and the little girl distracts herself from me by gazing unceasingly and intently at the little figurines. I rock back on my knees and roll my weight onto my feet as I stand up. I plop myself down into my adult seat, glancing at the khaki cargo pants and the little dresses. The preschoolers waddle and wander back and forth across the playtime rug—the one with brightly colored alphabet blocks stitched into. My eyes jump from child to child. Still no fighting. Still no choking. I twist around for the classic on the windowsill, and remember a poem about giving up the alphabet on a classroom wall for the stark white walls of an office.
Or, in my case, a library.
I grip a thick classic in between my two hands. I carry it around to look smart. Strangers and other high-schoolers that see me with it glance down at the book in my hand, and immediately their eyes widen and the most splendid mix of respect, honor, and bewilderment befall them. Names like Tolstoy and Orwell, Wells and Austen are never too far away from me, but still, they mean nothing. I hide a cheap paperback novel in my backpack for my actual enjoyment.
My mind wanders away as I watch the children placed under my “responsible adult” care. Around the coloring table, chubby hands grip at blunt crayons and clumsily, almost pathetically, fold stark white paper into crinkled, flightless airplanes. A tubby boy with thick curly blonde hair that builds two inches onto the top of his head grips his plane and slings his arm over his shoulder and out in front of him. The airplane dives into the carpet as if falling from the sky into a vast maroon ocean. I leave my classic on the windowsill and stand to retrieve the airplane. I pick it up. “We can’t fly airplanes,” I say. My voice is obnoxiously high as I speak to him, and in reality, I’d rather show him how to throw the airplane rather than take it away, but airplanes will “poke eyes out”, and so they are rigorously outlawed.
The boy flashes blue eyes and a quivering lower lip, a tactic he keeps hidden for airplane confiscation. I ignore it and fold the airplane up and place it inside my classic. I sit back down, and he busies himself with toy cars.
A few minutes later, a girl trots up to me, her uneven pigtails alive with static from rolling somersaults (excuse me, practicing gymnastics) on the alphabet rug. Clutched between two flattened palms are ten books. I glance around for my coworker, begging with eyes for escape from an hour of “Mr. Toby ate jam. Mr. Toby likes jam”, but I find her with her legs crossed and nose in her son’s homeschool textbook.
My shoulders sag; I repeat an anthem of “I love children” to myself inside my mind, and scooch from my adult chair onto the floor in front of the reading pillows. The little girl falls into my lap without warning, and my thighs scream against the sudden weight.
“Okay!” I say with a large smile. I reach for the first book and open it up. “ ‘Why I am special’, ” I read. I struggle against the sarcasm oozing from my voice, and I swallow it down with a noisy gulp. “ ‘I am special because I wear what I want to. I am special because I can sing any song….’ ” I keep going, fluctuating my voice and stretching it for character voices and silly exclamations, but eventually, my throat burns with the repeated rhyme scheme and cliché monkey-bouncing, balloon-popping, kite-flying simplicity of children’s books. After the ten books originally thrust into my hands, and five more brought by the other preschoolers, the little girl jumps from my lap and runs for the toy figurines in the corner. She drags the box across the floor with her, and I remember a time when I used to toddle in the old after-school day care room at the past school campus. The dinosaur figurines—machine painted with claws, talons, teeth, and ravenous facial expressions—once stood at the very top of my list of favorite toys.
The little girl dumps the entire plastic box onto the maroon carpet, and the carpet is no longer just a carpet but a transformed jungle with purple leaves big enough to sleep on, green vines that hang from trees like pipe cleaners, and a giant block castle where the king of the dinosaurs makes his humble home. I pick up the plastic T-rex and I smile. I line up the raptors and pretend they are guards, but I lose my smile. They are only plastic. They don’t move. Their faces don’t change. The rug is a rug.
I glance up at the little girl. A T-rex and a stegosaur in each hand, she bounces them on their stubby fake legs. Her expressions are vivid, glaring, and her lips mouth little words. I glance at the scattered books and the pictures in them, at the stack of blocks the little girl had hastily set up. Suddenly, she knocks the two dinosaurs together, and the stegosaur flies through the air and smacks against one of the blocks. It tumbles over, and the girl leaves the stegosaur on its side. She grapples for another figurine, and it too squares off with the T-rex. One by one, two by two, the dinosaurs challenge the T-rex until, finally, the girl reaches for the first fallen stegosaur. It scoots slowly over the maroon carpet. It stares into the T-rex’s eyes, and then they clash. They fall back. They clash again. Over and over, the little girl slams the figurines together, and over and over they always fall back from each other. I gaze at the figurines, transfixed, amazed, because in her mind, they aren’t plastic.
One last time, the two clash again, and the T-rex bounces up and down from its side to its back to its other side, rolling fearsomely away from the battered stegosaur. The T-rex stays on its side, and the stegosaur dances up and down.
“What just happened?” I ask sweetly.
Surprise overtaking her, the toddler’s head shoots up to look at me from the dinosaur clutched in her sweaty hand. “The, the, uh, T-rex was means. He, he, uh, was, uh, he was, uh, mean, and so the other dinosaurs, uh, they didn’t like him!”
I nod, smiling broadly and unsurely at her incoherent speech. “Oh really? That’s cool!” Again my voice squeaks and rings obnoxiously.
She nods vigorously. “Yeah! And so, uh, so, uh, all the other, all the other dinosaurs didn’t like him, uh, and so, uh, they fought him! But he was, uh, mean! And only, uh, this one—!” she shoves the stegosaur into my fist, “—uh, could beat him!”
I take the stegosaur from her and stare down at its fake tail, fake face, fake head, and fake fierce look. I copy the scowl on the stegosaur’s face and squint at it menacingly. Then I set it down.
“No!” the little girl shouts, and she snatches it off the alphabet rug. “He can’t goes over there! He, he, he’ll get hurt!”
“Oh, sorry,” I say hastily, glancing slyly at the alphabet rug. Was it lava? A lake? My eyes wander around its border, and the little girl distracts herself from me by gazing unceasingly and intently at the little figurines. I rock back on my knees and roll my weight onto my feet as I stand up. I plop myself down into my adult seat, glancing at the khaki cargo pants and the little dresses. The preschoolers waddle and wander back and forth across the playtime rug—the one with brightly colored alphabet blocks stitched into. My eyes jump from child to child. Still no fighting. Still no choking. I twist around for the classic on the windowsill, and remember a poem about giving up the alphabet on a classroom wall for the stark white walls of an office.
Or, in my case, a library.
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