Prisoner of knowledge
Let’s begin with a little exaggeration. How about: “This evening I was held prisoner, without food or water, against my will”. No, that raises too many questions. The reality is that I worked through suppertime, without eating, and I would have rather been at home for a birthday, and the doors were locked on the building because we were outside regular hours. There you go, I’ve managed to set a fictional scene and then deflate the whole thing into a heap of banal balloon rubber.
Actually, I was a winner in the sense that the work session meant I was there as a security blanket in case new technologies malfunctioned, and I was able to spend my time in a school library. Much better than some of the other places I’ve sat waiting for techno-disaster. This wasn’t a large library, but its roots go back to the time of the Second World War (such a historical phrase. If we hadn’t purged the collection about a decade ago, the original collection would still be on the shelves.
School libraries were the Wikipedia of an earlier age. Small, often inaccurate, tidbits of information stored in an easily manipulated format: paper. Even the smell of older books (lightly spiced with mould spores) is one that grows on you after time. And the range of material; Dewey would be proud. There were even piles of slightly dated popular magazines; Time, Macleans, NatGeo. I wonder if old Time morphs into something else after a few more months.
I had the chance to adjust yet another clock that had fallen out of phase with the planet (we changed to Daylight Saving yesterday) so my evening was complete. After all, the dozen or more at home is never enough. The final plus is that this extra time can be reclaimed at a later date; perhaps when the snow record has finally been passed and the city gets back to celebrating its quadricentennial (badly). As it happens, I might be there.
