setting the tone

eleven years is a long time. eleven years ago, i was seven years old.

*shakes head*

i have come to realize that books from the library all smell the same. doesn't matter what library its from--langson, heritage park, or the one off of newport and main. they smell the same. i just finished an annotated bibliography for my paper and after opening six of the nine books i took from these places, i have come to this conclusion. its not a bad smell. its not even a public smell. it smells...yellow, like old paper, but not quite; and the pages always feel the same between the fingers. its odd, but i think i like it. its the smell of learning.

i suppose this only matters to me because i rarely checkout reference books from the library--that is to say, i usually do my research online. whenever i do get a book from the library, its for pleasure, and those always smell different since they've been opened more times.

i've also been remembering the strangest things at the strangest times. once, when writing another story in a notebook, i suddenly remembered how in second grade, we always had to get the church bulletin signed by the priest every sunday so that our teacher would know we went to mass. if we didn't, then we wouldn't be able to recieve first holy communion. i found myself wondering if the second graders nowadays have to do that--well, the ones that still go to Catholic elementary schools.

and then, lastnight, i had a dream that our choir was warming up for a performance, but the student conductor (she was a grad-student) had the wrong music: the words were the same, but the tunes were different. so she was conducting and giving us the wrong rhythms and cues. then the men started to sing their piece--only it wasn't a piece we ever rehearsed in class. it sounded exactly like the "Kyrie Eleison" that the Advanced Woman's Ensemble of MDHS sang eight years ago, only the words were different and the men were singing it. hearing that melody brought back so many memories. and when i woke up, i remembered how i had cried that one morning when listening to that song; i remembered hearing it later on and crying all over again, the tears smudging the penciled words on my paper. strange.

i remember getting a paper back for my junior year British lit class and seeing the comments my favorite teacher had written. "Don't be so obvious!" he had actually written that. there was no comment on grammar, diction, or paragraph cohesion. that was it and it perplexed me that he would write such a thing. isn't it better to be explicit when trying to support your thesis? was he trying to tell me that my paper was mechanic and had no art in it? i still can't reconcile the idea that subtlity in a paper is preferred by some people. but then again, he was irish, and a strange, funny individual. and i liked him for it, i still do. so many students loved him, that my senior year, someone dressed up like him for Halloween: the black brother's robe with the green cummerbund. ah, how i miss thee, Brother Aquinas!

and before i sign off, let me leave you with one of the many passages i had to memorize for that class. and mind you, we had to memorize it in the original language:

Whan that aprill with his shoures soote
The droghte of march hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
Whan zephirus eek with his sweete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the ram his halve cours yronne,

-from "The General Prologue" of Geoffrey Chaucer's The Cantebury Tales