My Saturdays at the Travelling Library

Saturday mornings were what I lived for. Never mind the cartoons. Never mind the homemade scones and clotted cream that filled the downstairs with the scent of home, never mind the occasional family outing to the pictures. I preferred to spend that time by myself; Sunday was the Lord’s day and a day for family, and the rest of the week was spent in primary school (or grammar school in those later years), learning maths and history, cursive and spelling, being teased at recess. So on Saturdays, I took what solace I could in my borrowed books, reading beneath the shade of the old linden tree in my front yard like a living cliché.

I would wake every Saturday just before dawn to wait for the old Bentley to struggle over the horizon as the sun rose in a mottled sky; I imagined it was much like the old man who drove it, with its stiff joints creaking from the resistance of the slight incline toward my home, the motor puffing, as if out of breath, when it leveled off. And then there it was in all its rusting glory, the open windows an open mouth, singing John Mercer or Bing Crosby, humming Percy Grainger and Stravinsky. And then it would puttputtputt past my house, down the country road ‘til it stopped in front of little red-haired Judith’s house (which was the middle house on the street) and a lot of us children would dash, gallop, whisk our ways to the old red car whose back seats had been refurbished into a cheap bookcase that held perhaps fifty books on each side, and another fifty or sixty in the trunk.

The owner of the travelling library was sixty-three years old when I first met him; his name was Mr. Morris, he was wrinkled, and the top of his head shone like a foil candy wrapper when he took his tweed cap off. He wore thick gla...

... middle of paper ...

...a good story in your hands).

That Saturday, I waited for two hours. The sun had risen and the sky was a canvas of violet and apricot behind a mask of fog. I never heard the songs the open-mouthed windows would often sing, never heard the puttputtputt of its worn-out engine. Puzzled, I made my way over to little red-haired Judith’s house, who was only two years younger than me, and really not so little anymore. She’d stopped visiting that library years ago, but I figured she might know where he’d gone since her house was always the stopping point on his travels up our road.

“Judith, do you know why Mr. Morris isn’t here this morning?”

“But didn’t you hear?” Her green eyes lowered toward her wood-paneled porch as she spoke. “He was killed by the dreams outside of his head.”

It’s been seven years and six days. I work in a hospital.

People don’t read very much anymore.