Do You Have a Boyfriend?

    This question perplexes me, and always has. Why is it the one that comes quickest to the minds of people after, "what's your name?" I mean, does it matter? And furthermore, how do you reply? (My mouth tends to hang open for a moment, and then I manage, "uh . . . no.") The acquiring of boyfriends is a mystery entirely unplumbed to me, and although this has never bothered me I sometimes try to understand it.
   
    The boyfriend question has been asked of me many times in the past (to be fair, often in a joking fashion), but the encounter most imprinted upon my mind was the one with a very peculiar woman, dark of hair and squinting of eye, a friend of one of Mother's business associates, whom I'd never met before that day. Interrogations such as the one I was subjected to at her hands are more amusing than annoying, but leave one reflecting with utter bemusment upon the nature of humans.
    Impressively, "Do you have a boyfriend?" was not the first thing she asked me. First came, "you're fourteen, right?"
    "Sixteen," I replied, rather awkwardly because I never feel like I'm being polite enough when I contradict someone.
    "Oh. Do you have a boyfriend?" 
    "Uh . . . no." I said, with a stupid grin.
    This seemed to confuse her, as though she'd never heard of a sixteen-year-old girl without a boyfriend. And here I have a question to ask the world at large: when did one's boyfriend situation become the next most important part of one's identity, after name and age? And why? Should people start introducinig themselves thus: HiI'mJenniferI'mseventeenandyesIhaveaboyfriend?

    "Where do you go to school?" was another of her ceaseless questions.
    "I'm homeschooled," I said.
    "Huh." This also confused her. After a minute or two, she said grimly, "Well, no wonder you don't have a boyfriend, 'cause how would you meet someone."
    This extraordinary remark struck within me a wild urge to laugh, but I restrained myself.
    This little exchange was a hours after her first boyfriend question, so the subject must have been on her mind the whole time we were at her house. I'm not sure why it was so vital. I think she was comforted in the end that the only reason I didn't have a boyfriend was because I was unable to "meet someone"; no doubt it was just too mind-bending to contemplate a girl who had no boyfriend because she didn't need one. The very idea!
 
    Don't get me wrong. In her disconcerting way, I think the lady meant well. Perhaps, like many mothers, she studies other people's children and takes notes (what was done right in raising this kid; what was done wrong; whether or not the weird girl without a boyfriend would make a good daughter-in-law). Her own daughter, a sweet-faced girl with serious problems, is fourteen years old and has a boyfriend. If it made the lady happy to compare me to her offspring, then I certainly have no problem with it. But I couldn't help wondering if the poor daughter wouldn't have been better off without that boyfriend. What are the odds that they are meant for each other? That they'll end up with a lifelong marriage? What if the girl waited until she was looking for a husband? Would that not have left her some time to recover from some of the things she was suffering under and the issues she had (which will remain unspecified) at this very tender, immature, emotionally torrid age?

    I hear that the reason for boyfriends at this age is for "practice", so you know how to conduct a relationship when you are ready for marriage. I've seen no very marked evidence of the effectiveness of this approach, but I guess I'm not an expert. Anyway, I have another question:

    If you have been brought up properly (and I believe I have), with good conversation skills, good manners, the ability to interact with equability and imagination with people of every age, gender, and education; and experience in conveying your feelings adequately to someone you love and respect, then why would you need practice? I believe that a person who can make and keep dear friends can make and keep a romantic relationship. So why worry about it now?

    Another question:
    If you have not been brought up properly, and do not have any of the skills above mentioned, then is it advisable to "practice" with a boyfriend before you have acquired them?

    And lastly: a relationship that starts out as "practice" is still a relationship. So when it ends (which it must; it's just practice, right?), someone's going to hurt. Even if it's only a little.

    A disclaimer: I do not think that having a boyfriend is wrong. I do not think that having a young relationship is wrong. However, I believe with all my heart that romance is a serious business, not to be toyed with by fragile girls just past childhood, and certainly not something to be flaunted next to your name just so middle-aged soccer moms will approve of you.

    I realize that all these questions and musings are not particularly decisive, but I swore to myself when I created this blog that I would be honest about things that matter, and so I've been honest. And actually, I am resolved, in a way.
    I swear to never to let the opinions of other people affect my descisions. I resolve to use my judgement. I resolve to always apply manners, tact, care, common sense. Most of all, I resolve to make sure that my actions align with Biblical wisdom, because that is something which has never once let me down.

    So. Do I have a boyfriend? No. Will I have a boyfriend? Sometime in the future, perhaps. And would I ever let the opinions of others on the subject, the expectations of the world, rob me of my ability to think it through?    

    Never. 

     

Sweet Southern Library

    .

    This is the humble Polk County Library in Mena, Arkansas. I visited this library about once a week from ages five to eleven, and I'll never forget it. It's been a long time since I saw it, and in this photograph it's rather more attractive than I remember. But I daresay it was taken after they made things all nice following the tornado that knocked down the back quarter.
    This picture brings back dusty, blue-carpeted, tattered-bookish memories that have been stored in the back of my mind until the time when they would be needed . . . like now. It's impossible to convey the pull that the place has on my heart. This was where I tapped the blue-painted iron pillars in the middle of the adult section to hear the ponging sound; where I perused the rows of yellowing chapter books with The Right Honorable L.R.K.; where I admired the petrified gingerbread house that the librarians set out every year since about 1970. This is where my true education was begun; where I laid the foundation of my mind with dear old books like The Nickel Plated Beauty by Patricia Beatty, Under the Lilacs by Louisa May Alcott, the original Nancy Drew mysteries, Five Dolls and Their Friends by Helen Clare, The Four-Story Mistake by Elisabeth Enright, the Mary Poppins books by P.L. Travers, The Five Children and It by E. Nesbit, By the Great Horn Spoon by Sid Fleischman, and Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carrol.
    Many of these books are all but forgotten. When I lived there, that library hadn't been updated since about 1950, and even then not very thoroughly. I am profoundly thankful for it. I grew up reading faded, out-of-print books that no one had checked out for forty years or so, filling my heart with dear visions of girls in lace perched on windowseats; of surreys gliding over ruddy cobblestones; of homemade cakes and glass lamps and crackling fires and apple trees; old cities, American or British, with great brick buildings looming over streetlamped streets; of pioneers trudging across the plains; of women standing on the platform of the train station, waving as their soldier lovers headed off to the war; of children snowball-fighting in the midst of New England snowdrifts; of two-storied houses and the ladies who lived there; of handsome men with brass-headed canes, top hats, and mystery in the eyes twinkling above their mustaches.
    The books listed above are just the ones I can remember. There were so many others, and since I'm sure that library has finally gotten rid of all the old out-of-print friends I read and read again, I know the precious tales hovering at the edge of my memory are lost to me forever. But I still love them, and that's what counts.

    I have been intimately acquainted with five libraries since then, but that forgotten little library in that forgotten little town is by far my favorite. In the five years that have passed since we moved, my family and I have only visited it once. I hope to see it again someday . . . though I daresay they will have remodeled and other depressing things like that. However: a library is a library; and that library will always be the library.

    Librarians . . . where do I start?

    To be a librarian is one of the greatest callings in life. Good librarians maintain the equilibrium of the universe. A bad librarian . . . well, you know the type. You know the withered feeling you get when the old bat glares at you over the tops of her wire-rimmed readers, making you feel like a bottom-dwelling, unwashed, uneducated, imbecilic teenager who doesn't deserve to be sullying her precious books.

    Librarians are in a position of a great power, and I have known many who have abused it. I'll never forget feeling like a whipped dog as the librarian-on-the-dark-side working at the tiny library up the mountain lasered me with her aged, bloodshot eyeballs, saying, "you do know you have some books checked out, don't you?"
    " . . . uh . . . yeah . . . ," I quavered.
    "Well, I'm renewing them all," she said pointedly. I knew what she was thinking. "Better get them back on time, stupid teenage brat. Or I'll steal to your house in the dead of night and bite your neck."
    Well, I didn't get them back when they were due. By the grace of God I still don't have any fang-marks. But it's only a matter of time.
    The subject of wicked librarians chills me, and it doesn't do to dwell upon it overmuch. So now I shall reminisce about the great librarians I have known.

    I clearly remember three special librarians who worked at the Mena library. Shirley was the finest ever. Her merits included: a) a pair of spectacles which she perched on her nose when she looked at the computer. They had little chains on them! b) she let us check out as many of the dusty, tattered books as we could manage, even though the "limit" was supposedly ten. c) She had red bobbed hair and capable, slightly wrinkled hands like my mother's.
    Everybody loved Shirley. Her droopy, lovely eyes always had little smears of blue eyeliner around them, and she had never used them to glare at anyone in her life. She was always kind to children. She loved obscure, sweet novels such as Daddy-Long-Legs by Jean Webster, and she would spend forever talking with Mother about them because they were both enchanted by the same books. For years, when the phone at the front desk rang, she would pick it up and answer, "Lahberry" in her softest of Southern drawls. I consider Shirley the beatific queen mother of all librarians; immortal, unchanging, (except when I saw her on that vacation a couple of years ago: her hair was almost completely gray) a symbol forever fixed in our minds of grace and sanctified librarianness.
   
    She had two accomplices at that library, and I was very fond of them both. Dorothy was a very pretty old lady; she had a way of looking old without actually looking old (I'd like to know what her secret was), with soft white hair, an elegant, sculpted face, a collected smile, and delicate spectacles, which to my memory she never removed. She was endlessly dignified and wholly pleasant.
   
    Bill was another old person who didn't really seem old. I believe he was only at the library during certain days of the week, but my memory is a little hazy in that direction. He was so tall and thin that he reminded me of a stork with white hair combed over its balding head. He had the quietest voice, which never raised in tone or volume, and an Eastern accent. I have heard people say that the Easterners speak too harshly, but I personally think it depends on the Easterner, because he made it sound so graceful; the most natural way to speak in the world. He had a long, narrow face, an unshakable contented expression, and a truly dreadful wardrobe of things he'd had since the eighties. I loved the way he said "wuhsome" instead of "awesome".
   
    This trio of librarians reigned with justice over their kingdom, with happiness only slightly marred by the large-boned, beady-eyed lady librarian who appeared in later years to torment defenseless little girls over their book count.
    I don't know if Shirley, Dorothy, and Bill work there still, but it wouldn't surprise me. A librarian is, above all, faithful.            

     

Little Book o' Mine: a Memorial

    

    You look upon one of my most prized posessions. Once, it was one of those hideous school composition books with the disorienting pattern on the front and lots of useful information on the inside covers (like standard/metric conversions). Mary gave this to me. It was a prize for winning the writing contest for a kind of circle-of-friends newsletter that she used to write* (most skilfully, I may add). No other prize would have pleased me so well. She used her creative genius to make a patchwork of magazine colors and pictures, completely obscuring the original cover. (But leaving, of course, all that useful information inside.) It was the birth of a divine thing; something that took on a personality of its own. Mary had made the first of these fine little books for herself, and having no laminating paper she proceeded to very carefully laminate it with wide, clear packing tape. Properly done, one cannot even recognize the laminating as packing tape.

    I always rather regretted my laminating-job on the front cover. Should have started with the back. Never having done it before, I ended up getting the tape laid wrong, with little ridges and bubbles where it should be smooth. I used a thumbnail to flatten them as best I could and did my crying in private.

    I agreed with Mary that it must be a writing-book, in keeping with our largest craze of the time. I began to write in it. First on the family vacation to see Mesa Verde, where I wrote notes and jumbled-up scenes of a fairy-tale type story about a girl named Agnew, the idea for which came from the beautiful painting above.** Many tales came after that, all eventually abandoned for ideas of greater fascination, but I think of them all fondly, for they were all born of dreams, foolish fancies, fascinating paintings, and lovely things of every other sort. I wrote my heart into the book for two or three years, and now felt that a memorial must be written about it, for yesterday I filled the last page.

    I began my Book In A Month in it, you see. I realized that this determined effort, this story that I actually started with the intention of finishing, must be begun inside my old friend. I owe it to it.

   This book isn't the prettiest it's ever been. The glue on the back of the magazine pictures has begun to lift, and different colors of gel ink and plain inks of blue and black are scribbled incomprehensibly over its pages, cramped and with endless insertions and scratchings-out, without the waste of a single inch of writing space. But no other book for writing in has ever felt so good in my hand; has ever served me so well; has ever beckoned so cheerfully with its empty pages, saying, "write in me! Come on, don't give up! You'll be published one day!" It's like a piece of my heart that must now be set aside and replaced with something new.

    That something new happens to be another writing book. It was once a hideous school compostion book, but I glorified it with magazine clippings, laminated it with packing tape, and promised myself to one day write in it. And when I do, it'll be the birth of something divine.

    I'll treasure you forever, little books o' mine.

    Love, American Kate

    *Rebekah Caroline was the joint victor for that contest. She also recieved a masterpiece collaged composition book for a prize. I don't think she wrote a memorial for hers, though. Mary also gave each of us a little certificate of winnership that she'd made. That girl thinks of everything.

    **It's called The Lady Clare, by John William Waterhouse. The subject is Lady Clare, the woman in the poem by Tennyson. Waterhouse was a truly phenomenal painter, and The Lady Clare is a truly phenominal poem. (It has a happy ending. Gasp!) And though I don't know much Tennyson, apparently he was a truly phenominal poet. You'll have to find out for yourself; you can't expect me to know everything.