Library Challenge

OK, I admit it. I’m one of those drones that Rush Limbaugh lambastes between GARLEEK commercials. Someone who wants something for nothing. I have been trying to figure out a way to enjoy a government-provided benefit without paying for it.

You see, I live outside the city limits. The city of Spokane wants to charge me $100 to use the library. This charge would be in addition to the $100 that I pay in overdue book fees year after year. Now it would cost me $200 to keep Dickens’ “Bleak House” (my intended summer reading every year since 1984) from June until December.

So I hatched a shameful plan. I headed to the post office right across the street from the downtown library to inquire about renting an in-thecity post office box that would give me a Spokane mailing address and qualify me as a resident.

I slipped inside and asked what the cost of a post office box would be for one year. It was $35 for a whole year, $65 in savings with a post office box thrown in. Maybe I could sublet the P.O. box to other unfortunate county residents and clear a profit on my idea.

The library was a good place to consider the investment. My teenage daughter was with me but I had not told her of my plan since she has more important concerns, like not being seen in public with her father. We were standing at the elevator doors waiting for a ride to the top floor when I noticed an unusually attired lady at the pay phone just to the side of the elevators (unusual people are not that uncommon at the library).

Something about her was familiar. My single talent in this life has been my memory for faces and names. I remember people who haven’t the slightest recollection of me. I used to confront the victims of my memory by speaking their names very loudly; then when they responded with a look of bewilderment, I would loudly speak my own name; then when they continued their blank look and said something like, “uh … oh … yeah, how ya doin’?”, I filled in the blank by reminding the person that we both had second lunch together when we were in the fifth grade at Whitman School. I don’t do that anymore.

But I was sure I knew this lady on the phone from somewhere. She had apparently forgotten the number she wanted to dial and, hoping the number would come to her, was “air dialing” (that’s when you lightly tap the phone buttons, without really dialing until your fingers remember the proper numerical sequence - it’s not a crazy thing to do; I do it all the time).

Then she spoke, “Who’s this?” I knew the voice and now the identity. She was my high school sweetheart, except for those frequent but painful periods when she was someone else’s sweetheart.

“I didn’t dial your number!” she spoke loudly. She’d kept her fiery temper through the years.

I turned to my daughter and whispered, “See that lady on the phone?” Just then my old sweetheart began banging the phone and screaming curses (a double sin at the library).

“What about her, Dad?”

My teenage daughter views me as someone from another planet, or at least as someone who should go to another planet. Why reinforce that perception by explaining my connection with this woman? “Is she a bag lady?” “No … she … ah, got the wrong number,” I muttered.

The elevator arrived.

“There are a lot of weird people at the library, Dad,” she remarked with childlike innocence, “a lot weirder than you.”

On the way to the top floor, I thought, “A hundred dollars to be a member of this place? Even $35? No way.”

I went over to B. Dalton and purchased a brand-new copy of “Bleak House” ($16.95), which will save me a fortune in fines during the next decade. However, I will miss being in the company of people weirder than me.

MEMO: Darin Z. Krogh is a Spokane Countybased free-lance writer.