oh.

Library in midsummer: quite possible the most boring place to be and to work. Being without IPod I recently purchased a “walkman” CD player which looks archaic and feel cumbersome bulging into my tight pocket. Depending on the day my pants cannot even contain the dated device. It sits out upon my book car for all to see and apparently criticize.

You’d think that with all the milestones of technological progress that even old equipment would be improved upon, but you’d be wrong.  Every step skips my simple cd’s song. This summer has dragged on in the buzzing heat and arid bored of summer work. Unstimulated, stagnant in the dust of unread books and abandoned interest.

Long ago I stopped listening to music and sought refuge in the seemingly endless cacophony of collected audio books. Steven Martin and David Sedaris appeased my long felt longing, occasionally summing a hearty “HA” exaggerated by my electronic deafness. Noam Chomsky had be talking to myself- constructing well supported debates that no one cares to listen to, to be, to fathom. If I can reduce the conflict to the most simple and unarguable terms: It’s genocide.

I listened to everything from Dante to The Golden Compass, exhausting everything in between.

That is, until I finally fell upon the Shakespeare collection.

I poured over and into them. Their sweet sound sauntered away my days until I almost longed for work.

One day while listening to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, I stood alone in the elevator soaring upwards with my cart of books and my CD of soul. I have a funny habit of repeating words I like to say, often in particular and eccentric ways. In this case I was miming the Narrators way of “Oberon”. This infatuation with words that please the mouth and mind is almost as profound as my distaste for diphthongs and rigid word. Marlboro being one.

As I was swooning in private joy of the exhaling experience of this play, two girls get on to the elevator with me.

Now there are those airy apparitions of beauty that float through the library, those pieces of poetry to the eye that warm all the air around them. The very pages of the library books flutter, turning to and fro simultaneously too shy to look, too enamored to look away.

These girls do not apply. They were not the elusive library vixens of which I am fond.

They had a tan, but I’m pretty sure it came with a registered trade mark.

They had a figure, but I couldn’t figure it out.

Shall I compare thee to a Butte bus top?

Thou art more frequented and pedantic.

                So I my eyes are closed and I’m saying the word “Oberon, OOOBeron” over and over. I have my Walkman out and I’m having a good time. I do not realize the door is open, I do not realize the ridicule. I open my eyes finally and talk off my headphones. They ask what am I listening too, and I tell them “Shakespeare…what else would I be listening to?”

They laugh.

I do not.

I am reminded of an anecdote I’ve recently read, in a book about Bhuddism by Jack Kornfield called A Path with Heart. In which the author describes his return to the United Sates adorned in his robes with shaved head. While waiting for his sister in law at a beauty salon he hears a gaggle of girls mocking him and his attire, his posture and his mediations. They ask each other “Is he for real?”  he opens his eyes to see the bemasked women, caked in avocado paste, medusaed in hair curlers.  He responds to himself quietly, “are they for real?”

The girls get off one floor above. They don’t look fond of stairs.