The Green Wave

Last Friday I had the wonderful chance to perform an hour of songs & stories at the West Springfield Public Library as part of their lunchtime concert series.  The people who came were delightful:  they munched their sandwiches and sipped their tea in between grinning and clapping, and occasionally, obliging me by trying to say or sing some Irish words.  It was a great pleasure to spend that time with them and also to find myself, once again, making music in a library.

I hadn’t realized how much that meant to me until then, nor how long this combination of libraries and performing has been in my dreams.  Like many things in life, you look back and all at once see the tracks leading to where you are now; you’ve been making them without fully understanding what you were doing.  But there they are!

These last two years I’ve gotten more and more chances to give concerts in libraries. I remember that my first library came close on the heels of a particularly disastrous attempt to play at a bar.  The place was altogether too cool for me, too laid back, too dark, and too distracted.  “Know thyself,” commands the ancient Greek Delphic oracle.  Well, OK, then.  I’m really not that cool and I rarely find myself in a bar, and I spent that evening battling upstream with a tea-spoon instead of a paddle.  I wasn’t at home.

In the library, on the other hand, I am happy in a familiar temple with its cherished holy items (books and maps) and its priests and priestesses (the librarians).  I’ve been a library-goer all my life, finding solace in their silences and dignified spaces, and finding delight and instruction in their books.  My life opens up as I scan shelves or pore over the card catalog (yes, I’m a fan of those old magic boxes – but I also love the new wizardry of keying in a search and receiving the instant rewards).  Libraries have always provided me with the particular shelter my soul most requires:  gentleness, learning, curiosity, and the understanding that the world is waiting to open its pages to us.  All we must do is ask.

When I was young, my mother and I used to attend concerts, plays, and poetry readings at our local libraries (the Dyer in Saco and the MacArthur in Biddeford).  Those nights glow in my memory.  Our libraries, usually quiet places, bloomed into life and merriment.  I can remember a night when the the MacArthur was so full of people that I sat on the floor to leave my seat for someone who needed it more.  This afforded me the thrilling advantage of being even closer to the performers – Northeast Winds that night, I think – and getting to watch their hands and even notice their set list, taped to the floor.  I watched them quietly negotiate changes to the list and share a private joke.  An inside view:  I loved that!

I think I loved it most of all because it brought together the things I loved best:  music, books, poetry, learning, art, kindness, and festivity.  These are still my favorite things (apart from moons and oceans and birches and apples which best fit in libraries in the pages of books).  Watching those concerts and plays and readings, I lived two lives:  in one, I just soaked up the beauty of what was offered.  In the other, I dreamed that I could be that person making music or reading poems there in that most perfect of concert halls:  the library.

And now in the beauty of life and all its winding and mysterious ways, I am.

Isn’t that rather wonderful?

The West Springfield Public Library