First date at the library

Friday 24^th February was a wet and drizzly afternoon. There was soft thunder and I needed my cardigan and a shawl. As I entered the library I asked Lazarus the library assistant for a comfortable chair. He duly obliged.  

I walked with him into the children’s section, a large rectangular space, with the walls four shelves deep on all sides. The books, however, looked dusty and dry. I worried they would disintegrate if I disturbed them.

In the near left corner a toddlers table and a few chairs had been set up and seven little faces, aged across the primary grades, looked up. A little anxious? I was. The children were busy with some building blocks and number cards. Where were the books? A library come afterschool club?? Two adult school desks and 2 hard chairs were also in the room. One against a wall, the other in the middle of the chipped linoleum floor. Both were occupied by college students.

I invited the children to join me. Chairs and feet shuffled and scraped towards the slice of maroon carpet on which the chair was placed. We were tucked nicely into the far left corner. There was one small shy boy in a grey khakis school uniform, five girls in blue checked dresses and red cardigans and one fidgety girl in a green and gold polyester tracksuit. Later on a small girl with big round eyes in a black summer dress with colourful flowers arrived. She sat on the floor looking up at me with her plastic umbrella at her side. She had hurried over, she said, when she had heard there was a story. The fidgety girl was in and out her seat. Putting her tracksuit jacket over the back of her chair. Wandering the shelves and returning to sit and then sigh. We took no mind and carried on.

Of the girls, two sat eyes wide and leaning in. One girl sat back in her chair, tight lipped, arms folded. Despite the lack of eye contact her body seemed tense with concentration as I read from Michael Morpungo’s The Butterfly Lion.

The Butterfly Lion is a young reader that tells the tale of a  boy and a white lion cub and tracks both the boy’s and the lion cub’s travels out of Africa to Europe; one to England and the other to a circus in France. The ending sees the characters meet again, later in life when they are grown. A series of happy and sad events take us there.

But time moved and concentration waned. So, some 45 minutes from meeting, we all decide to call it quits for the day. We agree we would finish the story next time.

The little boy in the grey khaki shorts came over to me, stood very close and whispered ‘thank you’ whilst looking at his feet. My smile lasted all the way home.