It's time to strike the set

How indeed. I’m having a terrible time moving out of my office; I seem to have moved into it body and soul. Friends call it “the cave” because I don’t use the overhead fluorescent lights, as a rule — just a couple of table lamps, one of which I picked up at a flea market in Gainesville. Add the brown walls and brown furniture, and it probably does seem a bit dark in there, but I find it soothing.

I also find that it has covered a multitude of sins, especially the sin of accretion. Everywhere I look, I see things I don’t know what to do with. There’s a huge rusty railroad spike on my desk, which I was thrilled to pick up because I thought it would be a piece of Commerce history for our Heritage Room someday — a notion I’ve clung to, despite the dubious gazes of Commerce natives who seem to think railroad spikes just litter the roadbed.

There’s a photo of Jean Booth on the little round table opposite my desk — Jean in the Heritage Room, among the historical books and materials for which she was curator for more than a quarter of a century; Jean who, we liked to say, put the ‘Jean’ in genealogy. Jean who could often ask a person a few simple questions and then roll out his or her family history like fabric from a bolt — fabric with a pattern she knew and loved and could see with her eyes closed.

We lost Jean to heaven about a year ago, but in the picture on the little round table she is very much alive, rosy-cheeked from having been out in the cold, and glowing the way she always did when she had managed to reach into the welter of history and “find someone’s people,” as she liked to say. A handsome young man has his arm around her, and he’s smiling, too. He flew in from the West Coast hoping for just such a miracle. The two of them still have their coats on; they have just returned triumphantly from a trip to the courthouse in Jefferson to locate some obscure historical records.

The photo, like Jean, will live on in the library; it belongs there. But will others look at it and see a whole day, a saint, a story? I’m surrounded by them nowadays: Miss Annie Mae Cochran, late of our staff, regaling us with stories of her childhood, and even of her grandfather’s childhood in slavery days, when it was a crime to know how to read, and he knew how; he had taught himself. And Frances Griffin, also of our staff, silver-haired and elegant, still gorgeous at 90, arriving for work and announcing incongruously, “I’m drunk today,” because she was having an attack of vertigo, but nothing could keep her away.

I think I’m realizing that maybe I can’t quite leave the library, after all. I can take my rusty old railroad spike and go home, but a part of me will stay there, in the stacks, at the front desk, in the kitchen. Happy as can be.

Susan Harper is the soon (Saturday) to be retired director of the Commerce Public Library. She lives in Commerce. The public is invited to a reception in her honor Sunday from 2:00 to 4:00 at the library.