Our community library was like a second home to me as a child. My family went there often and when I was eight years old, I started making weekly trips on my own by walking there after my piano lesson and spending a blissful hour or so before my dad came to pick me up on his way home from work. Because I was a voracious reader, it wasn’t long before I felt I’d outgrown the children’s section and decided, one day, to explore the rest of the library.
I wandered around for awhile, feeling immensely aware of the fact I'd crossed some invisible boundary. This was where adults belonged. I came upon a quiet row housing a series of Time Life books, pulled one off the shelf, and sat down in a cozy nook all by myself.
The book was a pictorial history of World War II.
Not having been exposed to the concept of war (I was that kid who grew up without television), I flipped through the pages with little comprehension at first. I wasn’t sure what I was looking at. A particular photo grabbed my attention, one I won’t bother to describe but which is seared on my memory as if I am looking at it today. I went back and forth, reading the caption and then looking at the picture. Something was wrong. Something had to be wrong. Slowly it dawned on me that this picture depicted real events, that this thing really happened.
The processing of this information was terrible, actually physical, as if something forced its way down my throat that was much too big to swallow. I sat there blinking and gasping; I couldn't catch my breath. Without knowing it, I was crying.
An old man shuffled around the corner. He looked for a long moment at the book that lay open in my lap and then said slowly, in heavily accented English: “War is a terrible thing.”
He took the book and closed it, sitting down beside me. There were tears streaming down his face; I first noticed them as they fell upon the cover. The sorrow from this man seemed to create a third presence, calming and sobering in its own way. Gradually I felt myself back in the library again, but this time so tired and so different. After awhile the man pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket and offered it to me. It was neatly folded and I opened it entirely, as if he had passed me a secret note.
We sat there for the longest time until one of us got up to leave.
I think it was probably me.