UNITED STATES—It was one of the ideas that caught on. Elimination of library fines. It prevented the libraries from doing what they were meant to do. Get the books out and scatter the seeds, the wild oats of knowledge into the rich soil of young brains. Graydon Miller had had his own trouble with the system. During that turnaround about-face of adolescence he neglected to return a book (so neglect would not be accurate) it was deliberate vengeance transfixed on a teacher who got under his skin.
In the course of a class assignment Mrs. Vigoda invaded that secret and private place, Miller’s own shrine and sanctum, the Carnegie library at the corner of Union Street and Trafton Alley, and the fines built up and built up as it lay in his house on the clothes dryer.
“Moby Dick,” by Herman Melville it wasn’t, more likely it was a book about television with an introduction by Bob Hope. OK. Deal is the fines, the nickels and quarters were piling up into high columns. Miller was going down the circular terra-cotta steps to the library to discover that his lime-green ten-speed bike had been stolen (in his anger at being at the library due to Mrs. Vigoda’s assignment, he hadn’t bothered to lock it up) and Officer Morton came up to him in the night and said, “Grady Miller.”
He looked up and smiled, “why yes.” The words were barely out of his mouth and officer Morton, a rookie himself, “Let’s go for a little walk. I hear you’ve been having some problems. I was once your age, too.” Chet Morton took him down to the old police station, where they had an empty cell handy.
“This is cool,” said Graydon. He remembered a field trip when they were in second grade and how you had a hole to poop in. In front of everybody. Except there was nobody there. It was pretty empty on a weeknight in Watsonville.
“I want you to go in there and think it over. The librarian tells you have a book long overdue. Like six months. It’s up to like fifteen dollars.”
Miller lost his liberty for 15 minutes. It felt like fifteen hours, one minute for each dollar.
Only years later, after his mother had died, did he learn that she (mom) not the librarian Seeley Sumph had cooked the scheme up to get him to return the library books, and now when they asked if he had ever been convicted of a crime, he couldn’t get that 15 minutes out of his head.
That was the legacy of Mom, this dunder-headed belief in hard work and this ultra-honesty. His mother was now ashes rather like iron filings, but Miller could conceive of bringing her back from the dead, just to say, “What were you thinking?”
Years later he wrote a poem about that lime-green bike infused his animosity, at the hard work, the sadness and the anger.
Money is Not the Issue (The Decent Thing)
I wanted a ten-speed
bicycle bad, like lovesick bad.
My parents made me work for it.
I swept, painted, weeded,
Delivered newspapers.
The garden, got my fingernails dirty,
built shelves for Dad, dusted
amber pharmacy jars and vials,
washed windows, reeked of Windex,
three years and more, I was
indentured. I counted the bills
and coins weekly and coveted it,
saved it in my toy gunmetal
gray Fort Knox safe.
I wanted the best bike
with a fine pressed leather seat
from Great Britain
and a chrome molybdenum
frame, Kool Green.
I would’ve gotten a Peugeot
bike if I could have. I was
a born snob.
At long last I got my luxury bike
for my birthday and slept with it
in the bedroom at night,
thrilled by its smell of fresh
gumwall tires and lube.
A sleek continental cross
in a circle on the front, Instead
of a dopey oval with
S-C-H-W-I-N-N
spelled vertically.
Afresh Saturday, after
my first week as a 12-year-old
I raced the lightweight Schwinn Le Tour
around the track at Geiser field,
alone in all the world, and sitting on top
of it, smug as the first lone person awake
in a sleeping house.
Then a red dog ran in front.
An Irish setter. . .
I braked hard and flew
over the handle bars,
over the drop handle bars,
The sky did a somersault.
Then I was flying in an
Ambulance through Freedom,
sick to my stomach.
All I could think about was Evel Knievel
was flying the next day over Snake River Canyon
and I was missing a Presbyterian swim party
and felt hot shame, though no one was to blame
but me for gripping the front brake hard.
The calipers locked and I dove straight into night.
There were a few minutes missing from my reel
after that, like parts of the old print of “True Grit”
by the time it made it to the Fox Theatre.
A young guy with gold wire glasses
and a handlebar stache
came to Mom’s door and said, Your son is on the field.
Every horror a parent can imagine about their
child, Mom must have imagined in that moment.
The guy with the wire glasses had done
the decent thing.
He called an ambulance.
He lived next block down
Beach St. in an olive-green duplex
Anything to help. He’d be there.
He moved away right after that.
We never saw him again.
Or the red dog.
To be continued…
