MEDFORD, MA
The Medford Public Library, mid-March 2014
High Street, near Medford Square
The 94 bus route to Medford Square is more circuitous than I had originally thought.
“If I want to go straight to the library from Davis, what’s the best way to go?”
“Well, the 94 goes right by there.”
Indeed, but had I gotten off at my house and walked, I would have been there and home already. I’d only ever gone to the library on a whim, never on a mission. Stephen King’s On Writing had come in and they were holding it for me. I had to get to the library. As soon as possible.
Now, Stephen King’s On Writing was certainly old news to most by this point in time. It was March 2014. On Writing was published in 2000, not long after King was struck from behind by a light blue Dodge mini van on one of his many walks along Route 5 up near Bangor, Maine. By the time I got around to caring (and I mean, seriously caring…a lot) about On Writing, King had considered and decided against retirement, and published something like sixteen more novels.
I started reading King in 1992, when I was 13 — Carrie, of course — then powered through Christine, It, The Shining, The Dark Half, ‘Salem’s Lot, Pet Sematary, Firestarter, and finally stopped with Needful Things somewhere around 1999. I rekindled things for a minute with The Stand in 2003; I enjoyed it, but King and I had basically gone our separate ways in the late 90s. I can’t remember why, exactly. In 2002, a classmate brought in an excerpt from the “Toolbox” section of On Writing to share with our freshman comp. teaching practicum at Kent State University. This may have prompted me to take a look at The Stand, but on the whole I was focused on books by people named Faulkner, Woolf, Eliot, and I stayed that way until somewhere around March 2014. Except it was around then that I realized I had this Ph.D. in literature and I couldn’t remember the last time I’d just read a book. And it was killing me.
Back in the wintertime, I started taking some creative writing classes as a means to shake off the tortured scholarly prose and get back to where I once belonged. To my dismay, the only things I had to write about were my daily waves of post-Ph.D. bitterness and how I felt about my recently deceased cat. These feelings were intense, and my aphasia on any other topic only made things worse. I felt like an exposed nerve. My writing teacher liked to quip, “There are only so many human emotions,” to help us build confidence in our writing. I created my own version of this: “There are only so many human emotions. And I am having all of them. Right now.” It wasn’t until I finally took a walk one Saturday morning over to the Library that I started to settle down.
The writing teacher asked us to make resolutions about the progress we’d make in the next 30 days. Other people planned their memoir projects. I vowed to start reading again. Just reading. At home, I surveyed my walls of books. Here are the Victorian and modernist novels I’ve started but never finished. Here are the graphic novels I’ve never even opened. Here are shelves upon shelves of literary criticism and theory I’ve been trying to shove whole into my head. I have so many books. I couldn’t read any of them. That Saturday, I walked down Winthrop Street, darted across the roundabout at High Street, and made my way to the Summer Reading section of the Medford Public Library.
It’s a mid-century municipal building. It reminds me very much of the public library next to my old middle school in Austintown, Ohio, where as a little kid I would check out bags full of books, and as a big kid I would sheepishly explore the “Young Adult” spinner rack. (Back in the early 1990s, “Young Adult” didn’t mean wizards and sparkling vampires; it meant over-the-pants makeout sessions and teen angst!) The Medford Public Library is not fancy. It is not the flagship branch of the Minuteman Library Network. But they have shelves upon shelves of fiction and nonfiction. You can sit down and read the paper at old, expansive tables. You can peruse a dozen spinner racks of ancient paperbacks. And if they don’t have something (and let’s face it, while they have a lot, they don’t have it all) you can order it from the Minuteman Network. It’s a twenty-minute walk from my house, and I love it.
On that first visit in February, I felt I had forgotten how to use a public library (though now I realize that the point is that you can use it however you want.) I walked all around the place before I settled on Summer Reading. I wanted to read something completely different from what I had been reading. Nothing too fancy, but still something solid and good. Good librarians spent time and thought compiling this collection for the local school kids, and I threw myself upon their goodness and expertise. I picked up and put down several different books before deciding on Carson McCullers’s The Heart is a Lonely Hunter and The Member of the Wedding. I went home and gobbled those up in a matter of days. Then, I read seven books in a month. I’m still going strong.
Sometime in late February or early March, I sat down at one of the old PCs the library has for looking up books in the catalog. I wanted to know what they had on writing. In particular, I wanted On Writing. I can’t tell you why, but the book had acquired an aura…I felt it held important secrets or something. I don’t know, I just really wanted to read it. No dice, though. Not today. Medford doesn’t carry it. Denied instant gratification, I put my order in. A few days later, I got the email while I was at work. My mission: reach the Library before closing time! To the 94 bus!
Well, we know how that went, but I did get there before closing time. Book in hand and safely across High Street, I began reading immediately. I read King’s three forewords (yes, there are three forewords) as I took the footbridge over the Mystic from Shipyard Way to Route 16. As I walked down South Street toward Winthrop, I read King’s earliest memory of being stung in the ear by a wasp while he was playing “strong man” in his Aunt and Uncle’s garage. So many of his novels start with similar moments of childhood vulnerability. This one isn’t a scary story, but his voice is the same to me, so familiar. The voice of my old friend who regularly scared me so bad that I had to hide his books under my bed for days at a time.
And, it seems, we’re back.
–Rebecca Thorndike-Breeze
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