Pittsburgh Voyeur

            As a public servant who gets to see what books you read, working as a library assistant can bring hours of fun.  "Oh, sir," I'll call out gaily after someone's dropped off a stack of returns, "you forgot your bookmark in this copy of 'Anal Loving for Inmates'.

            Now, the everyday visitors have some foibles, but what keeps us motivated are the regular wackos.  Each library has their own.  I don’t mean the homeless people who come in to sleep in the comfy chairs (although I would like to point out that the last person to sit where you’re sitting urinated in his own pants).  I'm speaking of Baby Lady and Boat Man and Stan.  We give them a place to sit and they keep us endlessly entertained. 

            An Oakland library regular was famous for his loud muttering and singing.  Everyone else learned to move to another room or deal with it, but Baby Lady, who pushes a stroller with a realistic baby doll in it (she changes it in the bathroom), was annoyed.  She went elsewhere, but left her baby sitting in a chair staring at him.  Eventually he noticed it.  "Why doesn't that baby move?" he shouted.  "It's looking at me!”

            Boat Man circles the downtown library, and he loves anything to do with boats.  He's kind of loud, but let him talk about reefing sails or a boat in a movie or anything whatsoever to do with boats, and he will do so, happily, for hours.  He sings a mean sea chanty.

            Stan traipsed in one Saturday, announcing, "Hold all my calls, and if anyone comes looking for me, tell them I'm not here!"  He spread numerous papers, lunch sacks, and items of clothing across a back table. 

            An elderly lady came in and affably asked me, "Are you in school?"

            "No," I said.  "I graduated."

            "Degree in library sciences?" she said.

            "No, sociolinguistics," I said.

            A moment of silence.  "And what do you do with that?" she said.

            "I work in the library."

            After she left, Stan sidled up and said, in a stage whisper, "I'm sorry for eavesdropping, but did I hear you say you were interested in hermeneutics?"

            "No," I said, blinking.  "Sociolinguistics."

            "Hermeneutics is the study of language!" he boomed.

            "That’s linguistics."

            "Then what's hermeneutics?" he asked, and I shrugged.  "I'll look it up for you," he announced.

            I was on dictionary.com before he was, and let him and everyone else know that it was the study of Biblical letters and translation.

            "I'm sorry for using the wrong word!" Stan all-but-shouted.

            "It's okay," I hastily explained.  "People use the wrong word all the time.”

            Stan left later because he received a call that, as far as I could tell, informed him that his neighbor's dog had killed his mother.  I am fairly certain that this did not happen, because it would have been on the news.

            The library would be dull without them, and besides: free to the people means all the people.  Even Baby Lady.