Helen Boos

Peter Taylor/Jeremy Szteiter

Creative Thinking (CCT 602)

Collaborative Exploration 2

Food with Death, Flowers with Illness

In 2013, the Boston Public Library’s central branch is a sad place to work. Despite a reference collection that is – with no exaggeration – the envy of libraries the world over, with more holdings than any library in the U.S. except the Library of Congress – more, even, than Harvard University across the Charles River – despite all of this, the various reference departments have been methodically dismantled one by one. The Humanities Department was the first to go, followed by the Science Department, both absorbed into General Reference back in the 1990s. The collection is still intact, fortunately, but specialized library assistance for researchers is no longer available except in Fine Arts, Social Sciences and, possibly, Government Information. The worst is that this all took place before the internet had even begun to seem like a viable replacement, and well before the economic crash of 2008 that forced library budgets to a crisis point.

I work part-time in the Boston Public Library, in the Social Sciences department, which is housed in the McKim Building, one of two buildings in Copley Square. This is the central branch of the Boston Public Library’s 24-branch network. It has a circulating collection, which library users can access, browse, and check out books themselves, and it has the reference collection, with millions of items for in-library use only, which must be specially requested because they are located in stacks that are not open the general public.

The McKim building is “the old building,” built in the 19th-century and dubbed the “palace for the people.” It’s the one with the grand, marble staircase flanked by lions and the murals by John Singer Sargent. The McKim Building is one of Boston’s architectural jewels. The marble-floored, oak-shelved rooms once occupied by the Science and Humanities departments, not to mention the public reading room, the children’s library and many other library departments, all remain empty in order to better accommodate after-hours weddings and company parties that are booked with regularity.

Monday mornings, I find party-goers’ forgotten champagne glasses, sometimes still half-filled, perched in marbled niches and overlooked by caterers tasked with cleaning up. I imagine wedding guests in suits and dresses, leaning casually against the shoulder-high marble molding that forms a narrow shelf around the gallery. They absent-mindedly place their glasses beneath a mural of "The Muses of Inspiration Hail the Spirit of Light." A drumroll sounds from within Bates Hall and they exclaim, “Oh, they’re about to cut the cake!” Forgetting their beverages, they rush in and see, amidst the massive oak tables with green-shaded reading lamps and oak bookshelves filled with History, Genealogy, Social Sciences and Government Documents, the bride and groom posing for photos, knife poised to slice through the perfectly smooth frosting.

Bates Hall is one of only two rooms in the McKim Building that is still used for library services, the only room that contains shelves of books where patrons can sit and read. Of McKim’s dozen (or so) rooms, several have been turned into exhibition rooms and museum spaces, two comprise the café and restaurant, and five are left completely empty for event bookings. Boston’s “Palace for the People” is slowly being converted into a museum by day and event hall by night, a cash cow for the City.

The actual library functions out of the newer, and significantly less inspiring, Johnson Building, built in the 1970s in the understandably short-lived “brutalist” style of architecture, a particularly ugly style that half the City buildings were built in. In contrast to McKim’s marble that glows in warm golden hues and colorful murals on walls and ceilings, the Johnson building is made completely of rough and colorless granite, its “grand staircase” resembling something by Escher. As if to make it as drab an environment as possible, the rug seems to have been chosen to match the color of dirt. This is where I do most of my work, in the out-of-the-way workroom for the Government Documents department.

I sit beside my co-worker Frank, a full-time employee who worked in the Government Documents department before it merged with the Social Sciences department in 2009. I’m still working my way back to normalcy after a rather dramatic setback following the 2008 economic crisis, which was “rather dramatic” because – then as now – I was working my way back to normalcy after a lengthy and debilitating illness, a return to the U.S. after 10 years living and working overseas, and other personal changes, including a career change. Having come so far, it was devastating to slide back to where I’d started. There were other factors that contributed to that dark chapter, which I only mention in order to emphasize that I know what it’s like to go through a tough time.

I know what it’s like to know that you need something, maybe something as simple as an alternative perspective, to get you moving in a new direction because you’re stuck in a rut – or a ravine – and you can’t see past the walls on either side of you. But you also know that other people’s advice counts for nothing unless it feels right. You need outside intervention, but any real change has to come from within. A little information or inspiration from others can plant a seed, but only you can nurture it and make it grow, and in order to accept anyone else’s help, the conditions have to be just right.

Knowing this makes it all the harder to be a witness to someone else’s darkest days – to know that, very likely, there’s nothing you, or anyone, can do to help. But you help anyway. You do it, not because you care so much, but because you don’t not care, and you couldn’t not do it. In To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee writes, “Neighbors bring food with death and flowers with illness, and little things in between.” It’s just what you do.

This is the story of my co-worker Frank, and about my wish to help him work through a difficult time. It’s about the push-and-pull of caring and stepping back from caring so as not to smother, of getting involved in the life of someone who is not exactly a friend, but also not a stranger. It’s about knowing that I couldn’t ignore what Frank is going through, but also knowing that my efforts will most likely be ineffective anyway… but then again, maybe they won’t. It’s about the uncertainty and risk and self-restraint of being a bystander and realizing how sometimes, rather than creative solutions and problem-solving, what’s needed most of all is just “being there.”

--- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- ---

It’s late April, and my eyes are still adjusting from the bright spring sun when I reach the windowless workroom of the Boston Public Library. Frank’s desk is piled high with government documents – public service pamphlets produced by various government agencies, magazines for every niche of the government imaginable, and thick, hardbound law books.

Frank has stacked each shipment from the Government Printing Office in its own stack and placed the shipping receipt on top of each stack with some kind of paperweight to keep them from drifting. He makes a single stack for each shipment received, no matter how high the stack grows, or how unstable the paperback bindings make it. The taller stacks are prone to swaying precariously. The shipping receipts catch odd breezes from the heating and ventilation system and rise up in unison like sails on the ocean, his desk a clipper ship plodding the high seas. The stacks wait there until the labels arrive, shipped separately from a different government contractor, and then Frank will put the labels on and shelve the documents where they belong.

Chunk. Chunk. Kachunk. Squeak. Creak, kachunk. The heavy volumes of the 2011 List of Boston Residents hit the metal library cart as Frank prepares to move them from the workroom to Stack 1. He lumbers across the room, pushing the cart in front of him, slowly, laboriously, like Lurch in the Addam’s Family.

He looks a little like Lurch, too – a tall, trim figure, with a trim 1950s haircut and an intense gaze. I’m coming in for my 1-to-9 p.m. shift. He pauses mid-stride and looks at me. “How are you, Helen” he asks. A languid, mechanical sing-song, like a tenor version of Eeyore with a thick Boston accent. “How are” becomes “How-uh.”

He’s waiting for my reply. “Good, thanks. How are you, Frank?” I’m running through our usual dialog.

“Good, thanks.” He speaks like someone just learning English, like he’s pronouncing the words for the first time or trying to remember the right intonation. His speech is languid and languorous, but still somehow warm and soft as velvet, breathy as a woman’s. Fuzzy. Frank is, on the whole, very awkward, but his voice is his saving grace – his voice, and his gentleness.

“Has it been busy?” I ask, trying not to sound too cheerful. Frank works 9-to-5 in the library’s Social Sciences Department. Library Assistants are the non-professional library staff, technically not Librarians unless they hold a Master’s degree in Library and Information Science. Our department used to be the Social Sciences and Government Documents Department, just after the two departments merged. Before that, it was the Government Documents Department, when he and I first started working together, before the big layoffs in 2009, back when there were four or five full-time Library Assistants, including Frank. The Social Sciences Department was a separate department with one or two of their own Library Assistants. It’s just Frank and me assisting the Librarians now, and I’m only part-time. Still, there’s a lot less running around than there used to be, too, now that most government information is available online.

“Not too busy,” he replies. “I retrieved some Senate Journals from Stack 1, but that was the only slip to run this morning.”

“Stack,” in this case, means “Shelves,” and “Stack 1” means “1st-Floor Stacks,” or “the rows of shelves that are located on the first floor.” On Stack 1, they are closed stacks, which means that the public cannot access them or browse the shelves. If patrons want to use materials from the closed stacks, they find the title and call number in the electronic catalog, fill out a call slip to request it, and submit it to the Reference Librarian, who gives it to one of us to “run the slip” – i.e. retrieve the document from the stacks.

Frank pauses and then asks, “How was last night?”

He’s still facing me. “Just the usual,” I say. I try to match Frank’s cadence and intonation. I have to make a conscious effort not to talk to him with exaggerated energy, like a nurse or pre-school teacher, an instinctive reaction to his plodding speech. “There were about 8 books to reshelve.” In addition to the closed stacks, there are the open shelves in Bates Hall, from which library users can pull their own books. They’re requested not to reshelve their own books but rather leave them for us the reshelve so that we can make sure they are put in the right place, otherwise they’d be hard to locate except by browsing the shelves, book-by-book. It’s a slow night if there are only eight books to reshelve, but I add, “I think there was a class using the legal sets, but they put all their own books away.”

He pauses before replying. “Did you put down the number of books they probably used, for the statistics?” he omits the “r” in “number.”

“John put down an estimate,” I say.

“Oh that’s good,” he says slowly. I’ve been putting my jacket and bag away while we run through our scripted parts, but Frank had stopped what he was doing. Now he says, “I’m going to shelve these on Stack 1 and then do the room count.” He turns his head forward again. Looking straight ahead, he leaves the work area, pushing the cart in front of him.

---

No one quite knows what to make of Frank. Celia, one of the Librarians in the Microtext Department, whose desk we pass as we go in and out of our work area, asked me one day, “Helen, so, what exactly is Frank’s deal?”

Celia is a New Yorker, 60-something, never married, an amazing librarian who worked in the New York Public Library for eons. She’s an old-school New York intellectual – a mix of truly insightful powers of observation and a caustic sense of humor. You can’t name a writer or book that she hasn’t heard of and probably read. She’s not a show-off – she just loves to talk, loves to share what she knows, loves to hear whatever you’re willing to share. She has a passion for learning but will accept pure gossip if that’s all you have to offer. If I have a question about anything, I ask Celia before checking Google. She doesn’t always know the answer, but she’s always got an answer, and I always come away knowing more than I knew before. Or at least I hear a good story so that I forget what my question was, or forget that I’d even asked her a question to begin with. She’s the kind of person that seems to remember every reference question she’s ever been asked and every person who asked it. She’s the kind of person you’d think has seen every kind of person under the sun, so her question about Frank surprises me.

“I don’t know,” I tell her. “I can never tell if he knows more than he lets on, or less.” She waits for more, but all I can add is, “I don’t think anyone really knows what the deal is with Frank. We know there are limitations, but he does what he does really well.”

“What does he do?” she asks.

“Well, he keeps track of the incoming government docs, which are relentless.” We both roll our eyes, knowing that the government produces reams of information. Celia nods in the direction of the government information that’s shelved in the public area, rows and rows of documents from every branch of government – presidential papers, court proceedings, foreign affairs, statutes and records of every act of congress, every budget appropriation, every hearing that was ever heard, bound in 3 different formats and indexed in several more. And that’s just the federal government documents. There are also State, City and international documents, too.

“And he shelves everything.” As the words come out, I realize how inconsequential, how unimportant that task sounds. “Which is a huge job!” I add defensively. “There are these shelves,” I point to the open stacks in front of the Microtext desk, “and then half of Bates Hall is also GovDocs, along with all the GovDocs in the basement – half of which are missing because of the flood in ‘98.” That was when a city water main broke and flooded the lower level of the McKim building, destroying a good portion of the Government Documents collection. “And all of Stack 1 in the McKim Building.”

“You’ve also got shelves on Stack 6 of McKim,” Celia offers, a smooth little tip of the hat in Frank’s direction. I think to myself, “That Celia doesn’t miss a thing.” I nod appreciatively.

“Right,” I continue, “and shelves on Stacks 6 and 7 of Johnson.” The collection is truly immense: for every floor of the public area, there are two floors of closed stacks filled with materials in the reference collection. “And an overflow area on Stack 4 of Johnson, which I always forget about. And then there’s all the microfiche cabinets scattered all over the library. There are some in the halls outside the elevators and stairs on every floor of McKim.”

“Oh, those are yours? I always wondered whose those were.” Celia says admiringly, or is she just hamming it up? “That is a lot to keep track of.”

“You bet,” I continue. Now I’m hamming it up, too. “And, then there are two separate rows of fiche cabinets on Stack 1, and one on Stack 6. There’s even one on the 5th floor.”

“What,” she says, New York-style – a statement, not a question. “Outside the president’s office?” she asks as if it’s simply inconceivable. In reality, neither of us cares. But it’s something to talk about, I guess. We continue the riff.

“Yup. No one knew where else to put ‘em, I guess. And then, too, you know government documents have a whole separate system of call numbers.” I’m not sure why I’m doing a folksy Sarah Palin thing.

“Oh, that’s right,” she says. “The Superintendent of Documents numbers, right?”

“Yes, SuDoc numbers. Plus we use Library of Congress numbers sometimes, too. Just to keep things mysterious, I guess.” I laugh and we both roll our eyes again. “And a lot of docs are still filed under the old BPL call numbers.” I shake my head. “Sh-Yeah,” I say, the trendy, modern version of tsk-tsking. I pause to sober up again.

“The thing about Frank is,” I say, “not only can he keep track of all that, but if you tell him a call number, he’ll tell you exactly where the doc is located. If you tell him the title of a book, he’ll practically read out the call number like he’s reading off a teleprompter. Do you know, if Frank is in the workroom, I never have to look up anything? I just ask Frank. The Librarians don’t ask me to run slips if they can help it,” I say ruefully. I’m on a roll again, this time extolling Frank’s talents. “The phone rings and I pick up, and the librarians ask if Frank’s there. So then I ask Frank what they wanted, and he tells me, ‘Oh, they just need me to run a slip.’ They don’t even ask me to do it. They know it’s only a 50-50 chance I’ll know where to find it.” I pause to let this sink in, wondering how much I should say. “The other thing about Frank is,” I say, “I’ve never heard him say anything bad about anyone. I never hear him complain. Never hear him say or do anything rude. If I’m having a bad day, he says just the right thing to cheer me up, and if I’m down on myself, he finds just the right way to compliment me so I feel encouraged. He doesn’t talk a lot, but he’s a great listener and says just enough to set things right. I wouldn’t call him commanding, but for all his awkwardness, it’s not hard to respect him.”

Celia looks at me, and I can see that she’s thinking by the look in her eye. I wonder if she’s piecing together her memories of interactions with Frank to see how they fit with this new information, or if she’s thinking of all the other cases of people like Frank she’s ever known, but all she says is, “Some kind of savant?”

Only later I hear that Frank has applied for a job in the Microtext Department, which would involve a small promotion and pay raise. I never imagined Frank in any other department, and I can’t imagine the GovDocs Department without him, so I just can’t fathom this news. And then I wonder if anything I told Celia will have any bearing on his application.

---

I don’t hear anything about Frank’s job situation for another month or so. I’m in the workroom placing barcode stickers on the print editions of congressional hearings and then entering the numbers in the online records. I could pop the barcode under the scanner to have the computer read it into the system automatically, but that would take too long – I’m just that fast.

Frank’s heavy gait doesn’t match the delicacy with which he lowers his six-foot-two frame into the seat at the desk beside me. I wonder if he sits down so carefully because he’s afraid the stacks on his desk will fall over. Sometimes when the shipping room staff deliver the mail, the taller stacks sway and I catch my breath. I’ve sometimes suggested to Frank that the taller stacks might be divided into two stacks, but Frank just says, “Well… It’s okay.” Or “It’s easier to keep track of this way.” I can never be sure if Frank has an obstinate streak, in a benign but unmovable kind of way, like the Ents in Lord of the Rings, or if he really has a good reason for doing whatever he does, or maybe it’s both.

He’s just finishing his lunch break. He usually takes his bag-lunch down to the old, disused cafeteria, which is still the library’s only official employee break room. He eats there, but it’s no place to linger – windowless, cavernous, dimly lit and utterly filthy. Mice run brazenly across the room. Cockroaches saunter up the arms of the chairs where you’re eating. Every now and then, someone takes a sponge to the microwaves or fridges, but since the budget cuts in 2009, the cleaning staff don’t have time to clean the cafeteria or other employee areas except, occasionally – thankfully – the restrooms. The old food prep section is closed off, so there isn’t even a sink except a tiny one in the utility closet.

When the Johnson Building was added in the 70s, the cafeteria served hot lunches. In the 90s, full-service meals were replaced by a row of vending machines, a couple of refrigerators and three microwave ovens. In 2009, a pipe burst and the water damage ruined most of the furniture and the carpeting in the lounge areas outside the cafeteria proper – and increased the cockroach population exponentially. Then in 2011, the mayor of Boston mandated that all sugary snacks and beverages be removed from vending machines in City buildings. Now, the only reason most staff go to the cafeteria is to heat up their lunch in the microwaves, and only if they have to.

More than anything, the gloom is enough to keep most people away. Library legend is that, when the cafeteria was first built, decision-makers had skimped on the lighting, thinking no one would care; then they were apparently surprised to learn that the employees of the library weren’t really using the cafeteria, instead choosing places with proper lighting so they could read during their lunch breaks. Two buildings, millions of books, hundreds of library staff, and the library administrators hadn’t considered that anyone would be reading during their lunch break; that’s the Boston Public Library.

When the weather is better, most of the library staff eat outside. The McKim Building has a renaissance-style courtyard with carved stonework, a garden with a fountain in the middle, a portico along three sides and patios along the fourth. If it’s not too crowded, the tables along the porch are pleasant even in the muggiest of Boston’s summer days. But now, in May, the air blowing in from the Atlantic is still icy.

Rather than face the dismal cafeteria, and with an icy chill in the air outdoors, most of us bring a chair over to some quiet corner of the closed stacks where we can eat lunch and read a book. Someone put a cheap microwave in the photocopy room, so I don’t ever need to use the cafeteria. The only people I’ve ever seen in the cafeteria are the janitors and the security guards. And Frank.

At his desk now, he’s staring into space, waiting out the last ten minutes of his break. Unlike me, Frank never seems tempted, not even on a slow afternoon, to skim through a copy of Army Grenade magazine or linger over the glossy national parks brochures from the Department of the Interior. Except to affix the security strip in between the pages, Frank would never crack one open. I thought maybe his 30 years of service at the library had sapped his enthusiasm, but he tells me he doesn’t read for pleasure; he says he never really learned to enjoy reading.

At some point in the 3 years we’ve sat next to each other, I learned that Frank has never been anywhere outside the Boston area. He has a brother in Hanson, Massachusetts, about 30 minutes south, but the rest of his family live in South Boston, like Frank. The notorious South Boston – Southie – Boston’s Irish working-class neighborhood, home to Whitey Bulger and the Irish Mob and the violent protests against busing in the 1970s. I’d read all about Southie in the book All Souls: A Family Story from Southie by Michael Patrick MacDonald but in my 7 years in Boston, I’ve never had reason to go there.

Frank is from Southie – that explains all his missing r’s and his British can’t’s, pronounced like the name of the German philosopher, “I Kant type,” or “I Kant wait for Friday!”

I can’t help but wonder what goes through Frank’s head in all those long, quiet hours in the workroom.

He sips water from a paper cup and sighs once, gently. He allows a delicate cough to escape. Then he crosses his legs, white socks glaring out from between his dark pants and shoes like reflective paint used to mark lanes on the highway.

He places his cup among the piles on his desk. Frank has a hard time throwing anything away. Among the stacks of government documents are other stacks containing every note and message ever left for him, every delivery receipt, every set of instructions for equipment long since discarded. The paper cup, I see, is the same paper cup he’s been using for some time now. It’s just an ordinary paper cup from the water cooler down the hall, but for some reason he doesn’t get a new cup each time, just brings the old one and refills it. Now the paper is darker, the wax coating cracked all over, and there’s some kind of orange-colored film in the bottom. Eventually he will get a new cup, but instead of throwing out the old one, he’ll stack the new one inside the old one and drink from the stack.

The orange film in his cup really disturbs me. I don’t know if he doesn’t realize that it’s a kind of mold, or he just doesn’t care, and I don’t know how to bring it up with him without making him feel bad. I consider throwing it out one evening after he’s gone for the day; he seems just helpless enough that I think it’s the right thing to do. But I wonder if he’d notice it missing and, if he did, what he’d think: Would he appreciate my concern for his health and well-being? Or would he be offended that I took it upon myself to dictate his cup usage? Or would he feel bad to have troubled me? Or just be puzzled?

He sighs again, and I can’t help the feeling that there’s something on Frank’s mind. Time has weighed heavily on Frank for a while, and especially for the past couple of years since his wife’s death in 2011. But something’s different now.

For one thing, he’s started saying, “Eleven more years,” repeating it like a mantra or a prayer of repentance. In eleven years, he’ll have worked long enough to collect the maximum retirement benefits.

It’s around this time that he tells me one day, “I just want you to know, I’ve applied for a job in Circulation.”

I nod, but I’m thinking, Circulation? I thought I heard that you’d applied for a job in the Microtext Department. What is going on? But Frank is not one for discussing personal things. “Well, I hope you get what you want,” I tell him, “but just so you know, we’ll be lost without you, so I also hope you don’t get it!”

“Ohhh!” He laughs, understanding that I’m kidding but I also mean it. “I’m sure I won’t get it anyway,” he says.

“Let me know if there’s anything I can do to help,” I offer. “I’ve done a lot of job searching in the past 5 years, so maybe I can help.”

“Thank you, Helen,” he replies. But Frank rarely accepts a favor, so I don’t expect him to take me up on my offer. “Let me know if there’s anything I can do for you, too,” he tells me.

---

One of the few things that I know about Frank is that he has a son, Vincent, who’s now 21 years old, who dropped out of high school. I had met him last November, in 2012, when he came to the annual Board of Trustees dinner in honor of the library employees. Since the Christmas parties were cancelled, it’s the only staff event all year. It was Frank’s 30th anniversary and he was receiving a plaque for his years of service. Frank’s son is a good-looking young man, with Frank’s height and build and his mother’s glossy, jet-black hair and almond-shaped eyes. And smart, too – he’d been a student at Boston Latin School, Boston’s most academically rigorous public high school. Most BLS students are bound for Ivy League colleges but, according to Frank, his son was giving a speech at some point in his sophomore or junior year, and something happened – something so upsetting that Vincent walked out and never went back. A few years after that, when he was just pulling himself together, he lost his mother. He now works part-time in a supermarket and is struggling to get his high school equivalency degree.

Frank has mentioned that he has a tendency to fixate on things, and judging from the frequency with which he mentions Vincent’s schooling, I have a feeling Frank can be a real nag about it. I suspect he gives Vincent a lot of grief about not finishing high school, not least because he’s paid a lot of money in the past year for an expensive self-paced online program that Vincent ended up never completing. I can tell that Frank is bothered by the whole situation, and I don’t imagine it’s easy for Frank to find just the right tone that’s sometimes needed to guide young adults. I try to assuage Frank by telling him that what Vincent is trying to do is extremely difficult – to try to find the self-discipline to study on his own, without the benefit of a school or teacher to which he’d be accountable – and not least because of his age and so soon after his mother’s death. I reassure Frank that very, very few people are able to maintain that kind of discipline, even in the best of circumstances.

Recently, when I ask how Vincent is doing, Frank gets morose. Vincent had just had a car accident and although no one was hurt, the car was totaled. They deliberate whether to buy another one right away or try to hold out until they can save up for a down payment, but within a couple of weeks they buy another one. Frank doesn’t drive, so I suspect that he relies on his son for certain things. Plus, a car is a young man’s freedom. In discussing these things, Frank mentions that he’s been having financial problems because of the loss of his wife’s income.

I mention that, with summer underway, I’m taking two online classes in web design and continuing to hone my writing skills with classes at a non-profit organization that teaches creative writing in town, both of which I’ve suggested to Frank as options for himself or Vincent.

Before I know it, Frank is shaking his head, getting down on himself for his lack of education, telling me he wishes he’d made different choices for himself, how he wishes he hadn’t wasted so many opportunities. I’m floored. Frank has never revealed anything about himself before.

“Frank, I don’t know…” I stammer. “I mean, I hear what you’re saying, but I’m also looking at your life… You’ve got a 30-year career here at the library. You’ll have an income in your retirement. You have a home, a smart and good-looking son….”

“Yeah,” he says, even more defeated than usual. “But I never got an education so I keep thinking how different my life could’ve been. I started studying to be a nurse but when it got hard, I just quit. I didn’t need to quit. I could’ve just changed majors. Now I see my son going the same route.” He shakes his head.

I don’t know what to say. “Well, there are no guarantees.” I know it’s a lame response, but I’ve never heard Frank talk like this before. “I’ve got education out the yin-yang and look where it’s got me. I’m only a few years younger than you, and with all my experience and qualifications, I can’t even get full-time work.” But then I see that this is only making him more depressed.

“I don’t know what this world is coming to. To think of all those years you went to school and studied and worried about the cost, and how much you must’ve learned. And then you still can’t get a job.” He looks down and shakes his head.

“Anyway,” I say, “It’s never too late. Lots of great men made their greatest discoveries or wrote their greatest novels or… or operas or symphonies at your age. Now that you see where you are, you can take steps in a more positive direction.” I wince at my words. Frank just looks at me, and I can’t tell if he thinks I’m as foolish as I feel, or if I’ve made an impression. “No, seriously,” I continue, “maybe you can’t become a rock star or an astronaut, and it probably wouldn’t be wise to try nursing again…”

“No-ho-ho, I wouldn’t want to do that,” he says.

“But you have as many opportunities now as you would have had 25 years ago. So? You were busy with other things – building a home and a family? Now you’re entering a new phase in your life. Instead of thinking just about what you didn’t do in your past, why not think about what you can do with your future? Knowing what you know now, you don’t want to look back in 10 years and be saying the same thing. Figure out what you’re good at and go for it, right? Like, for example, they say everyone’s got a novel in them, right? You could start small, like take one of the writing classes I’ve been talking about. Or maybe just do a class at your local high school’s Adult Ed program to get started….?”

Very gently, thoughtfully, he tells me, “I think I could see myself writing poetry.” I try to hide my surprise. But now that I think about it, I can picture Frank writing poetry. Somehow, it fits.

That evening when he’s gone home, I check the library catalog for books on writing poetry, go up to Stack 5, the closed stacks where the books on writing are located. There are about three shelves of books on how to write poetry, so I spend my dinner break finding a handful that I think might work – short, down-to-earth, manly (or, at least, not especially feminine), and meant for beginners. I bring back several and leave them on his desk with a note that I hope is encouraging.

---

One day, Frank walks into the workroom, and as he passes my desk I see that his khaki dockers are torn clear across his backside and down one leg, a giant khaki flap hanging down to reveal his boxer shorts underneath. I don’t want to look. He must not realize, or else he would’ve done something, right? So… should I say something and embarrass him? Or should I say nothing and let him walk around like that? If I say something, what should I say?

“Um, Frank? I don’t know how to tell you this, but… do you know you’ve got a big rip in your pants in the back?”

“Yeah, I know. But I don’t know what to do about it.”

“Oh. Well, I think I have some safety pins. Would that help? Or you could try taping it…” although I know from personal experience that ordinary scotch tape is no good on fabric.

“I could try the safety pins,” he says. “Do you have some?”

I give him the three I keep in my purse. He’s gone a very long time and finally comes back with the flap pinned inelegantly. When I see him the following week, I ask if he made it home all right, and he says the rip pulled open again on the ride home, so I wonder if his big hands hadn’t been able to manage the tiny pins very well, or if the fabric just gave way. He doesn’t express any sense of embarrassment.

---

The stack of poetry books doesn’t move for a month or more. In the meantime, I’ve also researched a few places that offer poetry writing classes of various levels and degrees of seriousness, as well as adult education in general. Boston is practically awash in these kinds of opportunities but I think Frank needs to be careful. It could be tough for him, for example, if he ends up with a group of hoity-toity housewives who think that, by virtue of their Ivy League bachelors’ degrees, or their husband’s Ivy League bachelors’ degrees, that their poetry is on par with that of next Adrienne Rich. Lord knows, I ran across plenty of that attitude at the writing center where I take classes. So I suggest a few of the more down-to-earth places to start.

“Thank you, Helen,” he says such sincerity that I feel sure he’ll be signing up for classes as soon as possible.

---

Frank has started asking me how to use Microsoft Word and, again, I’m dumbfounded. Frank has always made it clear that he’d be happy if he never had to use the computer, ever. As it is, Gail (our manager) can barely get him to read his email regularly. Sometimes, when an item listed on the shipping receipt is missing, he turns on the computer and, concentrating as if trying to crack a safe, goes online to fill in the official government Web Claim Form to re-order the missing documents. More than that, I had always thought, he will not do.

I walk him through the basics of using Microsoft Word and tell him I’d be happy to show him more, whenever he’s ready. He asks if I’d mind if he has to ask me several times to show him the same thing if he forgets. I tell him that’s absolutely no problem – in fact, most people have to ask several times, and the best way to learn is when the person in the desk beside you can help you at a moment’s notice. I try to sound reassuring without condescending.

“I never could read from an instruction manual,” he tells me.

“Neither can anyone else!” I laugh.

“Ohhh,” he says, “I doubt that!”

I write out some basic instructions in case he forgets how to get started and tape it to the computer monitor. Secretly I’m thrilled to see him trying something new, and tell him about the latest research on how lifelong learning keeps your brain fit, eases depression and can even lead to better health and general youthfulness. Where Frank has trouble with ambiguity and change, my trouble has always been the opposite. I have trouble making habits and restraining my impulse to try all kinds of new things. I tell him about that, and about how I suspect that I have ADD. He seems interested and asks a few questions. Somehow I end up explaining neural plasticity and stop when I realize I sound like I’m delivering a lecture. He’s staring at me, and I can’t tell if he’s interested or just being polite. Anyway, I stop talking. “Thank you, Helen,” he says sincerely.

I noticed that he types using only one finger, so that evening, I check the online catalog for touch-typing practice books and bring a couple to his desk. I leave another note that I hope is encouraging.

The typing books join the poetry books for a while, but when the library announces that it will begin renovating the Johnson Building in the fall instead of the following year, as had been originally planned, the stack disappears. I ask if he checked any out, if he’s taken them home to start writing or practicing typing, and he just says that, no, with the renovations beginning soon, he thought the books should go back on the shelf.

---

In July we learn that we will all need to help enter data in the records for government documents that will be sent to remote storage for the next two years while the library is being renovated. Meanwhile, Frank is applying for more jobs. “I want no part in this move,” he explains, and he doesn’t seem to understand that every department in the library will be affected. I try to explain that it will be really hard to be just getting used to a new job and new responsibilities and be moving the department to a new location at the same time, but he doesn’t really integrated this information into his mindset.

He didn’t get the job in Microtext that he applied for, or the one in the Circulation Department, and he thinks it may be because his computer skills aren’t up to speed, so he doesn’t complain about having to do data entry now. Gail is pleased to see how happily he takes the news about his new data entry duties. Though he’s never used the keyboarding books I found for him, I can see evidence of him using the computer when I’m not in the office.

When we’re assigned to work together to start moving some of the sets of legal documents to Stack 1, I see that he can’t quite manage to adjust the shelves himself, that he has trouble positioning the brackets into the tiny holes. It occurs to me that his hand-eye coordination must be very bad. I’d already noticed that he sometimes flips things around, which is very noticeable when your job is to keep things organized. Delicately, I ask him if he’s ever been diagnosed with learning differences like dyslexia.

“No,” he says, “but I’ve recently been diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome.” I don’t know if he means “recently” as in “last month,” or “recently” as in “five years ago.”

He adds, “I don’t know if I believe that,” as if it’s an outrageous supposition.

“Do you think it’s true?” I ask.

“I don’t know,” he says. He looks annoyed. “They don’t tell me what I’m supposed to do with that information.”

I know a little about Asperger’s Syndrome and had already suspected he might be on the autism spectrum somewhere, along with other learning differences such as dyslexia. His physical awkwardness and odd speech are typical, although he doesn’t seem to fit the pattern of talking incessantly about a single topic that no one wants to hear about. He has mentioned that he tends to fixate on something, which is another symptom of Asperger’s Syndrome. Now that I think about it, it does seem that he’s focusing on the one aspect of the renovations that’s uncomfortable for him in the moment, without seeing the big picture. His difficulty with this transition is, itself, very typical of people with Asperger’s Syndrome, who are often rigid and inflexible. Perhaps the most well-known symptoms of Asperger’s Syndrome are the social symptoms of simply not being attuned to social norms. In Frank’s case, these are relatively mild, such as not minding that his pants are torn clear across the backside. He seems to have escaped the worst Asperger’s symptoms, such as the lack of social filters – the near-constant stream of unintended insults, rude comments and self-centered behaviors that test the patience of those around them. These often lead to the social isolation that can be so confusing to Asperger’s sufferers. They truly do not understand that what they’ve done or said could be so wrong, and those around them don’t understand how anyone could not realize that “what was said or done was just plain rude!” For those who do understand, their hurt feelings must be ignored or explained in great detail before the person with Asperger’s can really understand.

---

We’re told that when the Johnson building is renovated, our workroom will be converted to the teen room, but no one knows where our new workroom will be. Frank, who’s not comfortable with change and ambiguity, has a new mantra: “I want no part in this move.” For the first time, I hear bitterness in his voice.

I’m not happy about the move, since it will probably mean that I will not have a fixed workspace. I’m generally pretty flexible, but at my age I need a certain amount of predictability. I’d be happy if I just have a regular place to sit so I can keep office supplies and a box of tissues on hand and make sure I get a chair that doesn’t give me a backache. I don’t have the energy to scrounge around for a ruler every time I need one. As a part-timer, I know that I’m more-or-less invisible to the organization, expected to behave like a portable appliance to be plugged in whenever and wherever needed, and I’m resigned to this role until the economy improves and I can move into a professional position.

It’s much harder for Frank to deal with all the uncertainty, and it’s all hitting him at a particularly bad time. It’s August, and he’s been turned down for two more jobs. The trouble is that, at his pay grade, any promotion would move him into a supervisory role, and I suspect that it’s hard for anyone to imagine Frank succeeding in a role that involves dealing with difficult employees – not to mention members of the public.

On top of those setbacks, he has just learned that if he retires in 11 years, he’ll only be 63 – which is two years too young to start receiving his retirement benefits – so he’ll have to either continue to work at the library for those extra two years or else find another way to support himself until he reaches retirement age.

Around this time, he tells me that if he doesn’t seem like he’s in a good mood, it’s because it’s coming up to his wife’s birthday and it makes him depressed. He says, “I’ve been on anti-depressants for years, but I’m still pretty depressed about it.”

I tell him I understand, and tell him to let me know if there’s anything I can do. “Thank you,” he says, “and you let me know if there’s anything I can do for you, too, Helen.”

I remember a friend once telling me that the hardest thing about losing her husband was that she had to also stop talking about him because it would make other people so uncomfortable, and she wished she could just talk about him and reminisce in a natural way, without people feeling all awkward about it. So one day, when Frank mentions how sad he is that it’s his wife’s birthday and she’s not here anymore, I ask him, “How would you normally have celebrated her birthday, Frank?”

“Well,” he says, “I don’t know. I guess I would have gotten her a card.”

“Would you have gone out to dinner or had a cake or anything?”

“No,” he says.

“A present?” I ask.

“No, just a card.”

I stop talking, realizing that the conversation is only highlighting how little they did to celebrate her birthday while she was alive, which is not the feeling I had hoped to inspire.

He tells me he should have done more for her. I say, “You sound like you’re feeling a lot of regret, Frank.” I don’t know Frank very well, but it’s hard to witness his anguish and not sympathize. Sharing the pain can sometimes ease it.

“Yes,” he says. “Especially because of the way she died.”

I catch my breath. “How did she die, Frank?” I ask.

“You know that she killed herself, right?” he asks.

“No, Frank, I didn’t know that. I am so sorry to hear that. I had only heard that she had died in the night.” I think, Jesus – pain is not the word.

“Yes,” he said. “I found her in the morning. She’d hung herself.”

My chest tightens. “Frank, that must have been very, very hard. No wonder you’re in so much pain.”

“It’s really tough.”

“But, Frank, don’t ever think that it was your fault. She made her own decision. She could have chosen differently. You know that, right?”

“Yeah, I know.” He pauses. “Thank you, Helen.”

---

I search my memory and my imagination for something I can do for Frank. People say that one of the hardest things is knowing how to help the people you really care about. How much harder to know how to help someone you barely know.

In my head, I start to plan a kind of Recovery Manual for Frank that would double as an instruction manual for getting started on the next phase of his life. One exercise, for example, would be to write a birthday card for his wife, and to celebrate the kind of birthdays he wishes he had celebrated with her when she was alive. He could also try different ways of honoring her memory, like with regular visits to her grave, with little rituals to give his efforts structure and meaning. He could write out a timeline of the major events of her life and then fill in all the smaller events that he knows about until he has enough material to write the story of her whole life. He could write her a love letter – no, a love poem – and read it to her at her graveside. He could make a plan to explore a new hobby each month and then write to her and tell her about his experience. But I don’t plan on mentioning these ideas to him. How would I know what would be good and what would only cause more pain?

One day I do actually ask him if he ever visits her grave, if he has any rituals to help him remember her and to work through his grief. He says no, that the cemetery is far from his home and he’s not sure how to get there without a car. “With your son…?” I ask hopefully. “No.”

I tell him my idea of creating a ritual to honor her memory and he asks if that’s what I do for the loved ones I’ve lost, and I have to tell him that, no – my loved ones’ graves are really, really far away, that I have no idea where they are, actually, that I’ve often wished I could go there and bring flowers and maybe a poem that I think they’d like. Frank is quiet.

I think about how, when I lived overseas, I used to visit graveyards, how I intellectualized them as “representing the quintessential element of life,” and “an authentic view of the culture.” I hadn’t imagined they were the graves of people, not really – not real people who died and left their loved ones with an unremitting pain.

I think of all the graveyards I’ve visited even since moving to Boston, of the pebbles and small rocks that you sometimes see on top of gravestones. They remind me of the rock cairns I sometimes see along hiking trails and on mountaintops, so I mentally add another item to the hypothetical Recovery Manual for Frank: “Find a place you and your wife used to go, such as a park or beach near your home. Build a small cairn in her memory. Come back regularly and see if others have added stones.” I pause, imagining that it might feel nice for Frank if he sees that people have added to it. But then I wonder how it would feel if the cairn disappeared. Would it be devastating? It doesn’t matter, because I don’t plan on sharing this Recovery Manual with him anyway.

---

One day near the end of summer, Frank tells me his wife was bipolar. I tell him that that says a lot about her suicide. I ask him if he’s ever wondered if his son might also be bipolar, that it runs in families. He says he’s wondered about that too.

My summer classes have finished, and I have a few weeks to relax before the fall semester starts. I’ve brought in an old paper shredder that a friend had given to me that I had planned to sell in a garage sale that I never got around to having. I told Frank he could have it, and I’m showing him how it works. He starts telling me about how happy his son will be, since he’d been hanging onto all kinds of paperwork and junk mail and it’s been cluttering up the house. With a pang of guilt, I realize that it was probably my own flippant comments about identity theft that brought this on, how I’m too paranoid to throw anything away anymore without shredding it first. Could it be that Frank has taken this comment to heart, and without a shredder, the papers have just been piling up? I only learn about all this because Frank mentioned that he has to return a $50 shredder that he’d just bought because it didn’t work.

As so often happens in recent months, we start talking about his son. “The trick,” I tell him, “is not to talk about his schooling, but to entice him towards something that he wants but can’t get unless he has a high school diploma. It’s the difference between standing behind him and pushing, or just turning him in the right direction so that he just automatically starts walking.”

But Frank just looks at me. “What do you mean?” he asks. Taking things very literally is another hallmark of Asperger’s Syndrome, I remind myself.

“Like, for example, say he falls in love with a girl who tells him she could never get involved with someone who doesn’t have a high school diploma. That’d get him moving, I bet.”

“Ohhhh,” Frank laughs. “I can see that.”

“And then,” I add, “first comes the diploma,… and then the wedding…. You’d be the father of the groom… And then all the little babies running around, looking for their grandpa, calling ‘Grandpa Frank! Grandpa Frank!’ ….I bet you’d make a hell of a great Granddad,” I tell him. And I mean it. He’d be a fabulous grandfather.

Frank looks at me, says nothing, but an ever-so-slight shadow of a smile crosses his face. I think he’s probably never considered the possibility of being a grandfather before. He stands like that for a moment, his face transfixed.

“Ohhhhh,” is all he says, and then he turns back to the shredder. “How much do I owe you?”

He’s pulling a ten from his wallet. “Nothing, Frank. It was given to me, but I don’t need it, so now I’m giving it to you.”

“No, here.”

“Anyway, I was only going to ask for $5 in a garage sale, so you can keep that ten,” I insist.

He pulls a five from his wallet. Damn. But I know it’s pointless to insist.

---

Frank is applying for another job, this one in one of the branch libraries in the city – in Southie. I tell him I’m sure he’ll get this one, “Who could do the job better than a 30-year library veteran who’s lived in Southie his whole life?”

“I don’t know,” he says, not sounding very hopeful. “But they’re going to give me a typing test.”

“Well,” I say, “after all those other interviews, do you feel like you’re ready for any question they throw at you?”

“To tell you the truth, I don’t really remember the interviews. As soon as they’re over, I forget everything we talked about.”

“Would it help if we practice some typical questions together?” I ask. He says okay, and so I write down 5 or 6 standard questions and what he could say in response. We practice them together a little, and then he says he’ll practice on his own.

After his interview, he tells me that one of the current staff at the South Boston branch is probably going to get the job. He tells me, “I don’t think I’m going to apply for any more jobs. And Gail is getting pretty tired of me asking for a raise, since there’s no money available for raises in this department. So….”

---

For a while, Frank is so fatalistic that I think he’s suicidal. I’m worried enough that I ask him, “Frank, you know that we need you here, right?” He just looks at me. I think he knows what I’m saying. “And your son needs you. And your future grandkids need you. You know that, right?” I’m hoping to see the glimmer of a smile again.

All he says is, “Thank you.”

I Google around and find a few peer-to-peer groups for people with mental illness and give him the addresses for two that are a short distance from his house, I show him the web sites and tell him about their services, which include a 24-hour hotline as well as free classes in computer skills and fun stuff, like painting. I write down the hotline numbers along with their addresses.

“Thank you, Helen,” he says. And later, he tells me, “Thank you for those phone numbers.”

I tell him to make sure he gives that info to his son, too, just in case. He thanks me again.

---

I’m really worried about Frank. The library administrators still don’t know where our work area will be, and the uncertainty of it all seems to be driving him to the brink of despair. When our manager mentions that Frank may be given a tiny, dingy little office at the far end of the hall, where he’d sit alone, day in and day out, I’m worried enough that I tell her how worried I am. The only other option is only slightly better – in the disused end of Bates Hall, where it’s still very isolating but at least he and I could work side-by-side and he’d be nearer to the Librarians and have the sounds from Bates Hall just outside the work area. But when I mention it to Frank, he says, “It gets really dark in Bates Hall in the winter.” I wish I hadn’t said anything to Gail, and hope she asks Frank what his preference would be. Our workroom now is windowless, but it’s bright and there’s a lot of activity, with the Microtext staff right next to us and the noises from the public area coming over the partition. I’m starting to feel like Frank about this move. And that makes me feel nihilistic about everything.

---

One Friday afternoon Frank calls the library on his day off and tells me that the old shredder I sold him is jammed. I had told him that it sometimes jams, and that he can call me if he ever has any trouble.

“It was my own stupidity,” he tells me. “I tried to shred a BJ’s sales flyer and it was a little too thick. Now it’s totally jammed in there.”

I advise him to try to pick out the jammed paper with a toothpick and tell him I’ll call him when I get home to see how it went, sure that the toothpick would take care of it. At 7 p.m. I call him again and he says the toothpick didn’t work, nor had a pair of tweezers that he’d bought just for that purpose, and would I come over? I don’t mind going, at least in theory, but on this particular night, I’m stressed about a looming deadline for one of my classes and tired because I’m fighting off a cold, so I grouse to myself about having to go out to the infamous Southie, where I’ve never been before, and after dark too, not least because I can’t help but wonder if the urgency isn’t more an Asperger’s thing than a real need. Then I argue with myself: Still, it’s who he is, and what do you mean by a ‘real need,’ anyway? And I did tell him I’d fix it if it ever jammed. Plus he needed it to fulfill some kind of promise he’d made to his son. Apparently they’d had some sort of a “discussion” (or a blow out?) a few weeks earlier during which Vincent told Frank he wanted him to make more of an effort to clean up the clutter that’s accumulated in the last two years. And he wanted Frank to make more of an effort to dress right.

Now that I think about it, it’s almost two years exactly – September 2011 – since Frank’s wife passed away. I try to imagine what it must have been like that morning, waking up and finding his wife hanging by her neck in the bedroom doorway.

Going slowly, I manage to find his street without any problem. I put on my left turn signal and follow a bicyclist around the corner. For some reason, the cyclist swings his bike around in a wide arc, right into the middle of the street until he’s facing me, and stops. I stop too and wait to see what he’ll do. First he’s talking to someone on the side of the road. Now he’s looking at me. After a second or two, he moves to the side of the road and gives me the finger. As I pass, he’s shouting something about my turn signal, and I realize that he must’ve seen my turn signal after I’d turned but before my blinker had stopped blinking, so to him it had looked like I was going to make another quick left turn. It all happened in a second or two, just a misunderstanding and I wasn’t bothered, so I didn’t see any reason for him to fuss – but then, that’s Boston. Any opportunity to give someone a hard time.

I park the car a few doors down from Frank’s place, but the reputation of Southie and the bicyclist’s behavior make me feel a little on edge. I call Frank from my car, and after some confusion about which block I’m on, Frank says he’ll come and meet me. He thinks I’m on the wrong street. I get out and head towards his building and reach the front door just as he’s coming out.

Once inside, I feel at ease. I’m with Frank, and though he’s not exactly sweetness and light, he’s 100% good intentions. Despite how fraught things are with him these days, I find a certain comfort in his basic good nature and decency, and even his predictability – a small counter-balance to the constant onslaught of life in Boston.

Frank’s condo turns out to be a sweet little two-bedroom unit on the second floor, small but fairly new and fresh. The shredder is next to the recycle bin by the front door, beside the dining room/kitchen table. I settle onto the floor, flip the shredder over, and start digging out the jammed paper. I realize right away that it’s not the BJ’s flyer that’s caused the jam but just too much paper accumulated at the ends of the roller. “Whoa, you must’ve been doing a lot of shredding since I sold you this, Frank!” I cajole him. I talk while I’m digging out the paper the same way my childhood dentist used to talk while working on my teeth. I assure Frank that it wasn’t the BJ’s flyer and that I should have told him how the paper tends to jam at the ends, “like a vacuum cleaner that gets hair all wound around the roller,” but he doesn’t know what I’m talking about. He’s sitting on the floor beside me, picking up all the mangled wads of paper I pick out of the shredder. I comment on the beautiful parquet floor and he tells me that his wife laid it herself with a kit she bought from Home Depot.

I’m surprised when Frank mentions that his son is home now, just in his bedroom 10 feet away, and when I ask if he’d asked his son to try unjamming the shredder, Frank says, “Well, I didn’t want to bother him, so I didn’t ask.” It occurs to me that their relationship might be more strained than Frank lets on – living together but not speaking, like strangers forced to share an apartment out of economic need.

Frank goes into the galley kitchen and gets me a chilled bottle of water from the fridge, which I forget to drink. When I finally finish getting the jammed paper out from the corners, I try to pull the remainder of the BJ’s flyer out from between the rollers, but it won’t budge. I plug in the shredder and turn it on, and it runs smooth as a well-oiled machine. “Problem Solved!” I say, like I’m imitating a DIY show on TV.

I ask if we can sit at the table and chat while I finish the water. I push aside some of the clutter on the table and chair and make myself at home. Frank is mortified and remains standing, pressing himself against the wall. But it’s too late now, so I drink my water quickly, chattering blithely. Aside from the cluttered table, the house looks fine, though I only get a glimpse of the tiny kitchen and the darkened living room. I remember that Frank said his son has been working hard to get the house back in order.

---

It’s October and the big office move has been delayed another month. The public areas have all been relocated, but our work areas are still the same. For now. My mother has called and left a message saying that I need to call her. “It’s critical,” she says, but she doesn’t say what’s going on. My mother never calls me. We don’t really talk. I’ve determined that she’s got some kind of Asperger’s Syndrome, which would explain a lot of her behavior – the way almost everything she says comes out wrong, the way she misunderstands almost everything that is said to her. Talking to her has always been a minefield. Whatever it is, I just have to remember that the way she communicates and the way she understands things is just not like other people. So when she calls and tells me that she has to tell me something and “it’s critical,” it could mean anything: my father could be dead, or she could just want to ask if any of the stores in Boston carry her favorite quilting supplies.

I call her right away, just in case it’s the former. She tells me it’s not an emergency, and I should wait till I get home and we can talk then. “Do you want to give me a hint?” I ask.

She says, “Well, I’ve been diagnosed with congestive heart failure.”

I wait to see if she’ll add anything else, but she doesn’t. “Do you want to tell me what that means?” I ask. I’m choosing my words carefully.

“Well,…” she starts, “I don’t really know. But you get angry when I don’t tell you when I’m sick, so I’m telling you.” A few years ago she developed an infection following knee surgery and had almost had to have her leg amputated, she didn’t tell me until more than a month had passed after the crisis and she was almost completely healed. Another time, she and my father had been in a plane crash. I only learned about it because I’d been looking through her vacation photos, months later, and came across photos of wreckage dangling from trees and lying in mangled heaps in a forest. In the eighties, when I was living on my own and going to college, my father flew from New York to Arizona to have triple bypass heart surgery and residential care for six months, and though I’d spoken with my mother during those months, she’d never mentioned it. For years, I had no clue.

She still doesn’t understand why I’d want to know about these things right away, why it upsets me that she doesn’t tell me. By now, I’ve realized that it’s no use telling her that I want to be involved in her life in “real time,” that it hurts my feelings to find out later, in a “by the way” kind of way. She has said that she doesn’t see why it matters since my knowing doesn’t change anything. And I can’t seem to explain to her that I simply care, and that caring is what families do, even when they can’t do anything else. She can never understand that point. On the other hand, when I get angry, it seems to make an impression, so I get angry.

“Well, I’m really glad you called,” I say. “You know I’d hate to find out later.”

“Well, I don’t see what difference it makes, since you can’t do anything about it.”

It sounds like a jibe but I know that she’s just being very literal and matter-of-fact. I ignore the comment and ask, “Do you want to tell me your symptoms?”

“Well,… I get out of breath really easily,” and she tells me about a few times this has happened, which is what led her to see the doctor.

“Okay,” I say. “Are you in any pain?”

“No, no pain. Just out of breath. Weak. You know.”

“Okay,” I say. “Why don’t I call you when I get home from work. I can Google it and we can talk about it then.”

Frank asks, “Is everything all right?” I had told him there might be a family emergency, and he knows that I never make personal phone calls at work unless absolutely necessary.

“My mother was just diagnosed with congestive heart failure, so I have to figure out what that means. Do you know anything about it?” He doesn’t but wishes me good luck in talking with my mother.

---

One day, we’re chatting while we work, and I tell Frank that he should start exploring YouTube to listen to college lectures to see what interests him. “Considering where your head is right now,” I advise him, “it wouldn’t hurt to just try everything. You know. They say that everyone has a talent. Why not make it your top priority to figure out what your talent is?” He agrees, but it doesn’t seem like he’s been moved to action.

“I Kant really listen to the radio or anything while I work. I get too distracted,” he explains. And he doesn’t have a computer at home.

“What do you wish you had learned when you were younger?” I ask. “That’s a good place to start – but, you know, just be ready to open things up and try a lot of different things, because not everything is what it seems, and you may not be good at the thing you think you love, and be ready in case it turns out that you’re really good at other stuff you never thought you’d like.”

“Well, I always thought about becoming a journalist,” he tells me. I see a little glint in his eye.

“You know what, Frank?” I say, “I was afraid you were going to say that you wanted to be, I don’t know, a carpenter or a microbiologist or a saxophone player or something. But of all the things you could try, journalism in the 21st century is probably one of the easiest to get started. Hard to be really good, but easy to get a taste of it.”

He thinks about this for a moment. “Really?” he asks.

“Realistically, you probably shouldn’t count on becoming a staff writer for the Boston Globe. You’ve probably got to start that kind of career when you’re young. But if you want to write or record a news story, it’s easy to publish your own stuff these days because of the internet.”

He’s listening intently.

“Frank, I could totally see you standing on the corner out here in Copley Square, asking people what they think about this or that, conducting little spontaneous mini interviews. You’ve got that voice and such a nice way about you – I think people would tell you their mother’s best secret recipe if you asked them.”

“Ohhhh,” he laughs. “I don’t know about that!”

“You’d probably need a wingman or, you know, someone to handle the camera or screen people, help you formulate the right questions,” I say, “but I bet you’d elicit some really interesting comments from people.” And it’s true. It could be really interesting.

“And it wouldn’t be expensive.” I continue, “Most people’s phones have cameras these days. They post those videos on YouTube, and the quality is fine. You can ask your son to do the camera work – his phone is probably one of those. You’d have nothing to lose, and I’d be you’d learn a lot, just from the experience.”

He’s looking at me like I just gave him a puppy for his birthday.

That same day, serendipitously, Jim the ultra-geeky Library Assistant from the Business Library comes by, and we end up talking about how he found his passion in oil painting. “Yeah,” he tells us, “I just started talking to this guy who was selling his paintings on the sidewalk and asked him if he’d show me how to paint. So we made a plan to meet at his apartment and he gave me lessons. Now I’ve sold some pieces and have some other stuff in shows. I love it.”

“Really? You’ve sold some pieces?” Frank and I are both incredulous. “Like, for how much?”

“Like for two- or three-hundred dollars.” We stare at him speechlessly for so long it must have seemed rude. “Do you want to see some of them? I’ve got a website and everything.” He writes it down for us.

He leaves and I turn to Frank and say, “That’s what I’m talking about. You have to try everything. You just never know. It only takes a moment, and then things can change in a heartbeat.” But then I bite my lip. He doesn’t seem to notice.

“I know,” he says in agreement, opening his eyes wide for emphasis. And then he adds, “Thank you, Helen.”

--- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- ---

Frank’s story continues. Shortly after I submitted my first draft, Frank called in sick, saying that he was checking himself into a residential program for depression and he didn’t know how long he’d be gone. While he was there, we learned one day that the workroom needed to be vacated by the following day, so my manager and I loaded Frank’s desk onto carts and wheeled them over to the disused end of Bates Hall, where all the shelves of the workroom were also loaded haphazardly onto carts. It was mayhem, and we kept thinking it was actually good that Frank was not there when it happened. We were, of course, also glad that he was getting the help that he needs.

Within a week, a place had been cleared out for him in an office that is attached to the office for the Librarians in our department. It had been meant for Gail, the head of the department, but she didn’t want it. It had been used as a general storage area for the Librarians, and although it was unconventional to have a Library Assistant in an office with Librarians, someone decided that it would be best. Frank’s piles of Government Documents were arranged on his new desk just as they had been on his old desk, awaiting their shelving labels from the separate government contractor, their shipping receipts carefully placed on top of each stack just as Frank had left them, except eerily subdued in the less breezy office. I set up his computer and a table for incoming mail.

For myself, I was able to clear out a little spot amongst the mayhem of carts in the disused end of Bates hall, so at least when I go to work, I’ll know where to hang my coat.

Frank came back last week, and although slightly disoriented at first, he seems to have settled in nicely. I stop by to see him when I can, to bring the mail or coordinate on some project or other, and always jokingly ask him how he managed to finagle not only the department head’s cozy little office, but one the best offices in the whole of the BPL, with newly-painted walls, a low, arched ceiling and a big window overlooking the Italian Renaissance-style courtyard. He doesn’t respond, just looks embarrassed.

Ω

This photo of Frank moving a cart of books out of Bates Hall was randomly used in a story about Massachusetts libraries that appeared in the Boston Globe just after I turned in my assignment. The documents on the cart are even the Boston List of Residents! How weird is that?!

(Downloaded on Nov. 3, 2013 from http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2013/10/25/mass-libraries-strikingly-free-censorship/GV3LPCJO4kdzCb3a9HE6HJ/story.html.)

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