Settling

Posted on March 31, 2009 in Calm Encounters

I see more when I am at the Rancho Santa Margarita Library.

Mildly annoyed as a patron and a librarian get into it in the mildest, most gentle way. He cant get the computer that he wants. The librarian says “Sir, this one has the Internet.” “I’ll come back tomorrow,” he warbles from his gravelly throat. Such a martyr and a whiner. I straighten and peer over the scanner, printer, and other peripherals that share my table. Is there a pretty woman that the old man wants or is he just avoiding the teenager sitting next to the open spot who pulls his lips?

A fat kid comes by and mumbles to a grave-looking librarian “Where is my brother?” “He’s been kicked out,” she says peering at him over the tops of her reading glasses. “Oh,” he replies stupidy, and goes off to look for his kin. The matron follows him to the door.

So how do I feel about this, what is happening to me in the moment? I felt angry or irritated at the commotion. It felt too much like yesterday when I had that tutor conducting a lesson at my table.

This time, however, things settle down. The people walk away. The clicks of keys, the turning of pages, and the roll of the cash register at the circulation desk are all I hear and none of them are drumming on that place in my shoulders that makes me want to box the air.

The security guard struts his rounds, hands clutching his wrists behind his back. The world feels settled.

Waves lay down sand, forming smooth beaches that are only broken by the passing of feet or the landing of a sharp shell. That’s my best metaphor for the feeling of calm that I cherish. Feet jump when they find a butterfly shell or a corkscrew shell hiding amid the streaks and foam. So, too, can I be aroused by a jerk answering his cell phone in the quiet of the library.

Settling is a process, the calming of the sand. Each day there is a cycle, a turning — a rise and a fall. Each variation in the rotation leaves its flotsam, pieces that I rediscover as I examine the moments. Details become lost to me as I think about other things. The foam causes me to lose things – memory is like that. As the brain’s cholesterol of the brain grows thin, I lose bricks to build a remembrance of daily tragedies and comedies. This short woman wearing a cotton polo shirt and blue jeans – will she be there, walking in my mind’s version of the library, looking at numbers until she finds her book? The tutor’s young and sharp face got laid down because my anger rippled the sediments. That fossil won’t be lost to me soon, nor will the high, lightly freckled face of her student. There was a man typing behind me. Our plugs shared an outlet complex in the floor. He’s there along with the woman wearing a burgundy track suit parading her white dog. I don’t understand why some things cling and others get dragged out to the place of the missing.