Dear friend,
I’ve got a story I’ve been meaning to tell you for some time now. The story is set on a sunny Saturday afternoon in mid-December, unseasonably warm as December afternoons have seemed in recent years. I am standing at the front circulation desk in Olin library. My gaze is drawn to the beams of fresh sunlight streaming onto the lobby’s marble floor. I am checking out “Understanding Comics” by Scott McCloud and “The Dark Knight Returns” by Frank Miller. You are standing in line behind me. You check out “Historical Materialism and the Economics of Karl Marx” by Benedetto Croce, translated by C. M. Meredith with an introduction by A. D. Lindsay (call number: HB501.M5 C8 1922) and “Poverty of Historicism” by Sir Karl Raimund Popper (call number: D16.8 .P57 1957).
The circulation clerk is distracted, glancing past the old humming mumbling circulation IBM. Maybe she is longing for some time in the sunshine. Time away from a computer’s glow. Fresh Air. She sighs. Her hand trembles with nervous excitement. Maybe she just realized how much studying she has to crunch in before finals will end. Maybe she just can’t sit still because she has been holding in her pee since her shift began three hours ago. Did her friend just walk in? She waves and hopes for some conversation to break up the dull drum of charging and discharging our library books. With a well-rehearsed maneuver, she hands me back my ID. She takes yours. Her hand misses the mouse button as she scans your ID. She charges your books onto my account. And now we disperse, not knowing.
Your books are long overdue. Your final essay on Marxism is long since completed and left in a folder on the floor. Could you please return these two books so I don’t get charged for losing them?
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