D'you ever get the feeling that everything is exactly right with the world? You notice or realize or learn one thing and are stirred to your core, reassured, content, inspired?
Three weeks ago, at the library on my lunch hour, I noticed something new: a big raccoon sitting at a table in the children's room. Slightly battered, tilting a bit to his left, lovable, he sat there, paws on his lap, alone and looking despondent with nothing to read. Maybe he could get his own book after the library closes, but then it's dark and hard even for glowing green raccoon eyes to read. I scanned the nearby shelves. The first book I saw was Crafts for Kids Who Are Wild about the Polar Regions, which I didn't think a raccoon necessarily would be. There were similar books for the desert and the rainforest. No. A couple of shelves farther down, I saw the perfect title.
An Introduction to Face-Painting.
Of course! I opened the book, set it in front of the animal, and skootched him in his chair closer to the table so his paws could touch the pages. Turning a page surreptitiously (as a raccoon in a library must) is easier with paws already on the book instead of by his side. Now if he was bored with his bandit's mask, he could maybe get some new ideas.
There is a bear in the Koelbel library in Arapohoe county whom I always give a book, but the librarians seem not to understand. They always take the book away and put it back on the shelf. I get him good books, too, about building clipper ship models and keeping ant farms.
So today I went to the library to track down some titles from A Common Reader, Forbidden Knowledge, and from yesterday's trip to the Tattered Cover. I want the new Norton edition of Don Quixote, which a DU English professor edited. I've been meaning to reread that since 1987, when I had it in the ridiculous English class I nearly flunked. I knew at the time how important Utopia, Candide, Notes from Underground, Thus Spake Zarathrusta, and Dora were, and I even enjoyed everything up to but not including Nietzsche, especially Dostoyevsky, but I couldn't follow a thing the professor said about them. I figure a Norton edition with analysis and annotation, done by a professor I know and like, and even spelled a new funky way (with a j instead of an x), is just right. And if Foucault's Pendulum is impenetrable, I'll retry The Name of the Rose on Columbine's recommendation. Plus I saw Stephen Fry's Making History, and however weak the latter half of The Hippopotamus was, Making History reminds me of White Noise and I'd like to try it.
As usual, I read in the Adirondack chairs in the children's room for a while, since they're the only remotely comfortable reading chairs in the whole 'brary--all the others are straight-back student chairs. Leaving, I headed for the young adult aisle (which leads back into the adult stacks) when to my right, something caught my eye.
The raccoon, still sitting at the table, still with a book in front of him! My face split into a grin as I went to look at his reading material. A book on kite-making and another: Rascal!
I grinned all the way back to the office. Here, still beaming, I told someone about this incident. "Next time, give him some Beatles lyrics," he suggested. I started humming, and we realized simultaneously that the next book I should leave for the raccoon is a Gideon Bible. As if I were his Aunt Sissy.
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Last modified 25 October 1999
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