A lifelong love affair with the film section of a local library continues
There it was. My name.
Oh, I knew there was the off chance. After all, that particular library, the main branch of Canada's most bilingual city, is dutiful as can be about stocking Franco-Ontarian authors, and as I had piggy backed on one, playwright Robert Marinier, I could be reasonably sure that the work on which we collaborated might be there.
There. That exalted there - as in, in the play section. As in, a few mere shelves away from that other section. The section. The film section.
The section I have spent thirty years of my life, ever since my first trip to that establishment at the age of 14, pouring over, running my fingers along its various spines, breathing in its pulpy dust, running my eyes over its various covers, going eye to eye with Orson Welles, Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini and Francois Truffaut.
It's a section I still frequent, even if it's stopped being the one that I go to first. These days, in fact, it's third in my heart, after the new fiction releases and their ever growing CD collection. Still, I never fail to experience some semblance of a giddy thrill as I ride the escalator up to it (it's on the second floor); some last, insnuffable spark goes off inside me, a remnant from those giddier, younger days when I could not wait to pounce on those choc-a-cinematic-block shelves week after week after week, those glorious days before I had ingested every film considered a classic, and then every one considered a sub classic, and then every one considered a sub-sub classic; before I could answer every trivia question, before I had what it took to write a column such as Suite 101.
I may only be combing that section for their few new acquisitions today, but I never fail to take a moment to pull out an old favorite or two, just to flip through its pages and remember where and who I was when I first took it out: a park just outside an adult high school in the city's Italian quarter, where I found respite from the burden of belatedly finishing my formal education in a thick biography of John Ford and a bag of prune plums...the upper floor of a house across from a downtown high school, where I would sit up in bed with the woman who would become my wife and read her the choicest insights of Pauline Kael's...the worn couch of our first home, where I would point out a thick insert of publicity shots from MGM musicals to my dance-happy daughter.
It's a great comfort to me these days that, thanks to the discovery that my collaboration with Robert is a part of the library's catalogue, no matter what future displacements life has in store for me - a major move, a post-child second act, and, regretfully, the ultimate displacement, death - I'll forever, if only in book form, remain close to that section. I can't help but draw a parallel to my parents, with their long, on again-off again relationship, and their ultimate and fitting fate: buried in the same cemetery but not side by a side; more reflectively, just a few feet away from one another.
I, too, then, like mom, like dad, will forever enjoy that comfortable and telling distance from the one I love.
