midnight in the library

We don’t need Proust to tell us that memories connect in unforeseen ways. In my mind there is a scene, distilled from many afternoons browsing these wonderful books amid the family routine. Mom disappears into the kitchen, from which comes the aroma of meatloaf and corn bread. I settle on the rug in front of the TV and pick up Volume 2, with its evocative cover painting of a congregation of sharks and mantas swimming spotlighted under a bathyscaphe. I wander into a survey of Ethiopia until Mom yells that supper is ready. Somehow, as I close Volume 2, other activities surrounding my reading of these books—the mournful whistling that opens Lassie, the food and the steamed windows and David on the sofa with a glass of tea whose ice cubes clink—somehow these memories spiral down into the books, like the genie returning to her bottle in another of my childhood TV programs. They stay there, preserved among paintings and diagrams: a cuttlefish’s three hearts, Caesar’s army in Britain, how levees work.