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REFLECTIONS
The Places We Missed the Most
T
o say COVID-19 interrupted our sense of place and routine would be among the year’s greatest understatements. Columbia residents bid an abrupt farewell to many of their favorite haunts and hangouts. As spring rounded into summer, Tribune writers and community members waxed nostalgic for the places they were missing most. Several of these spots, including Columbia Public Library and Ragtag Cinema, reopened in part or full by press time.
Aarik Danielsen
COLUMBIA PUBLIC LIBRARY Columbia Public Library [COURTESY DANIEL BOONE REGIONAL LIBRARY]
Equidistant from my home and work, Columbia Public Library represents a frequent refuge as I navigate the chaos of any given moment. Two or three times a week — at least — my feet lead me there. To order an inexpensive cup of coffee. To browse the shelf of new poetry releases. For a quiet change-of-pace when I’m writing on deadline. Sometimes all of the above. As you might guess, the library contains two of the truest treasures in my life — books and the people who love them. During days of self-isolation, holed up at home without physical access to the library, my reading habit didn’t slow. It remained as steady as ever, as if the days remained normal. I spent time with the fiction of James Baldwin and Flannery O’Connor, the poems of John Berryman and Tommy Pico, the clever cultural analysis of Shea Serrano and a graphic novel about
Thelonious Monk penned (in more ways than one) by Youssef Daoudi. I didn’t miss, or even miss out on, books because the library was closed. Rather, I missed the two-way scope of what the place provides. By one measure, the library is immense, almost overwhelming. Multiple floors populated with books, rack after rack of jazz records and Elvis Costello CDs I need to catch up on, sensory delights for my 7-year-old son. It is a cathedral devoted to the sacredness of self-expression and human contact. And yet it feels so intimate. The library is a place by, of and for people. People whose hearts leap within them when you ask for a book recommendation. People hoping to discover authors whose words will come to define their lives. People who shop at the same grocery stores as you, swill beer at the same bars as you, take their kids to the same school as yours
— and yet, it’s at the library where they look up, notice you and offer a glance of recognition. “Oh, I see we are the same kind of people,” their eyes seem to say. This spring, I took to Twitter and said, only half-joking, that I’d probably cry when I walked through the library’s doors again for the first time. I think that might be right. Not because I’m overly sensitive or because I’ve experienced the worst of this pandemic. But because the library, as much as any other place in our community, reminds me I’m not alone. Books are there, and they have my proverbial back. People are there too, and they are worth reading just as much as the books. Traveling, quietly as one should, among both will not restore my sense that all's right with the world. But it will remind me that something is. Aarik Danielsen is the Tribune’s arts editor.
