Berkeley Flaneur: On My Branch

The Flaneur invites readers to visit a place so deep in memory that it sometimes resurfaces in dreams.

This is the renovated Claremont branch of the Berkeley Public Library located in the Elmwood neighborhood.It's on Benvenue avenue which was in 1979 the first street in town on which I lived. For another fifteen years beginning in 1984 I lived on nearby Woolsey street and worked at home on a mail-order book business. This meant I also worked at the Elmwood post office at the thriving copyshop on College avenue and at this library. I would spend a lot of time there reading for relaxation and to get out of the house as well. I kept up as a frequent visitor after I had relocate.
I lived near the University and would walk to and from St Albert's chapel in Rockridge for five o'clock Mass. The library functioned as a grateful way station where I could get water and rest.

The character of the place, less so today perhaps, is of an extended family living room with a fireplace with a gas fire in the evening and on rainy Winter days. Kids have always had a presence and it adds to a feeling of connectedness with a larger community to share the place with them.
Voting takes place here with concomitant patriotic pride of the generally left-leaning variety. I was a poll-worker myself and in the primaries there was one booth (way over on the right) for republicans and six for everyone else (demos & greens mainly).

Things like used magazine exchanges and, in the past, curious book "mini-sales" have yielded many an arcane and interesting article. I remember once huge heavy volumes of The Golden Bough for a quarter each, treasures of Jungian archetypal ur-text for pennies.

Last month I happened to mention to a librarian that I had been a regular here since 1984. He said his colleague was assembling people's recollections of the place, would I be interested in maybe contributing to it?

What would I write about? As I considered this, three ideas surfaced in my mind. Immediately the specter of inoffensiveness, not to say self-censorship nipped at my thinking. As my mental outline slowly arrived, I deflected by saying that my writing tends to be rather "Balzacian."

I meant Honore de Balzac who said:

Behind every great fortune is a great crime.

At this point I thought of the third idea of what I might write about to mutual agreement and interest. So here I write what came to mind.

The first memory I would relate is scented with rose oil. There have been many memorable folks I have known or just observed in my time here (for it is here at the library that I write this). There was a main librarian with white hair and beard whose somewhat flamboyant personality left an impression--I recall seeing him in Western wear and cowboy hat once or twice.

But the person whose ghost haunts the place for me was a strange quiet lady who came each day and apparently remained each day for several hours. She was always here when I came in and her tenacious aroma of rose was usually detected before she was in sight. She sat before the magazine rack in the center of the room with a large folio or magazine spread open before her and just seemed to generally survey the room in a state of unruffled patience.

She was in her thirties I would guess. Her age was always somewhat obscured by her dark sunglasses. I recall her as something of a gamine, Audrey Hepburn some length down Moon River. She wore antique finery including opera gloves, and wore indoors a grand wide hat, like a model on the cover of a fifties glamor mag, with a silk scarf tied over it. The idea of the madwoman of Chaillot is of course suggested but I'm certainly not of any fixed opinion that she was mad.
She may have been in a blessed state. The state you arrive at when nothing is boring anymore, when every moment no matter how mundane can be fascinating.
She intuitively sensed that I had the big consciousness too. I would say that we had a benign mutual admiration society without ever having spoken. I don't recall ever hearing her speak. She was dependably in attendance for several years in the nineties and since then I have never seen her again. She certainly has my blessing and I hope that she fares well today.

An event indelibly printed in my memory took place at the library one afternoon in 2010. I had spent the morning at a funeral Mass at St Albert's for a dear friend Faye. After it we had driven out to Benicia for the interment. As we returned dramatic, not to say portentous, clouds dominated the sky in all directions. We drove over hill and dale and highway while the rain held.
I got back to the Elmwood and dropped by the Library. Heavy raindrops started as I climbed the stairs outside. Suddenly a tremendous charge of thunder shook the whole building. Lightning flashed far brighter than the reading lamps inside. A sizable group of children with their guardians stood about in a condition of acute apprehension. Many were surely young enough never to have seen thunder and lightning in their entire lives. Thunderstorms are fairly rare here, I've seen less in thirty years than we would see in one New England summer.

At first I exaggerated my reactions a little, then I realized that the children were anxiously watching us to see how we handling this loud and violent display of nature. They needed reassurance and I quickly joined in the expression of it. In their innocence the children expressed an instinctual dread of danger, fear of mortality.
The loudest sequence subsided and it looked like only the smallest children might continue to cry a little while. In my own childish subjectivity it became a salutation and a farewell to my friend, who was a lover of roses and of the outdoors.

The third idea which came to me and which I mentioned to the librarian's interest was the story of a poetry reading I attended here some fifteen or so years back. The great and celebrated poet Barbara Guest gave a reading with the poet Ivan Arguelles a colleague with whom I had read on several occasions in the past.
Her poetry which is considered part of the New York school of the 1950s-60s. Her peers were highly regarded poets such as Frank O'Hara and John Ashbery. I had attended another reading by her at Diesel bookstore the previous year or so; she had then recently moved to the Bay area.
Her poetry is graceful and is often filled with the sort of indeterminacy codified by Mallerme. She had a tenuous association with the Beat Generation because she was reading in New York venues at the same time. As a result her poems and photos of her by Fred McDarrah were included in Sol Wilentz's 1959 book The Beat Scene. However as a friend pointed out she looked more like a member of the Rotary Club than she did a Beat. Through this Beat connection I latched onto her as early as 1970 and I still own several of her scarce early publications from that era.
The night she appeared at the Claremont, she was tall, slightly frail, white haired and dignified

Ivan read next and I believe he mentioned that it was "el Dia de los Muertos." It was actually not November second the day of the dead, or All Soul's Day; it was November the first, All Saints Day which is called Todos Santos in Spanish.
Having known him for years, I felt comfortable in pointing out the small discrepancy from the peanut gallery as it were. Ivan was not raised as a Roman Catholic, as Philip Lamantia once pointed out to me, so despite his Spanish surname these ancient Meso-American feast days, syncretized with the Catholic calendar, were not what he was brought to observe. So he may be forgiven his folly as he and a cheering squad of toadies piped-up that I was wrong, it was the day of the dead. Those who didn't agree kept silent

Barbabra Guest said nothing. I thought I perceived mild panic in her look, finding herself as she did in the company of some Berkeley poetry barbarians. She signed a copy of her Corinth book The Blue Stairs for me afterward. It was only when I returned home that I read her inscription in it.
"for _____, on Todos Santos, Barbara Guest".

An ongoing scene, a friendly and accommodating branch library, long may it last.