The Tapes That Came Back To Me

How Harold built me a place to sit

The back room at the library was never meant for a person to work in. It was where they kept the mop sink and the extra chairs and the Christmas decorations.

The first winter I read in my coat because the furnace did not reach back there.

Harold watched me come home with cold hands for about three weeks, and then he did what Harold always did, which was fix a thing without being asked.

He showed up at the library on a Saturday with his toolbox and a space heater and a length of lamp cord.

He built me a little desk out of oak he had been saving, a slab with two drawers, sanded smooth and sealed so it would not snag the pages.

Then he wired a lamp that curved over the desk on a gooseneck, and he set it low and warm so the light would not glare up off the newsprint into my eyes.

He had no idea, and I had no idea, how much that lamp would come to mean to me many years later.

He screwed a little cork board to the wall and he hung a felt pen on a string so I would always have one to label the tapes.

He was not a churchgoing man, my Harold. He would tell you that himself. But he believed in work, and he believed in me, and to him those two things were close enough to faith.

He used to drive me in on the ice days when I had no business driving. He would sit out in the truck with the radio low and wait the whole two hours.

I asked him once why he did not just go home and come back.

He said he liked knowing I had a ride. He said a man ought to be good for at least a ride.

That desk is still back there. The library kept it when they built the new addition. The young ones use it now.

The felt pen on the string is a different pen, I have replaced it a dozen times, but it hangs in the same spot on the same string Harold tied.

I did not marry a talker. I married a builder. And everything good I was able to do in that back room for nineteen years, I did at a desk he built me with his own two hands.

When he passed six years ago, quiet in his chair with the television on, I kept recording that same week. It was the only thing that held me up.

I think he would have wanted me at that desk more than anywhere else.