Or, going to the library and then out for dinner without your glasses
So with Sun square Jupiter I finally get myself to the main branch of the Cambridge Public Library, going on to the Institute of Contemporary Art to watch best British commercials of 2010 (Venus trine Jupiter) with P, my one and only friend in Boston. (Saturday, prone on my bed in the hallway stuffing myself with licorice, I googled Boston Public Library Main Branch over and over again, hoping to come up with the branch on Broadway in Cambridge duh! I was looking for trying to check Sunday hours - yesterday the brain began to work and I realized I had to google Cambridge. It is not easy groping one's way around a new city at such an advanced age.)
It's a beautiful day, the sun's shining and I hoof it to Harvard Square, hoping I can skirt around the yard (now closed to those without student ID because of the Occupy Cambridge going on inside) and get to the library where I used to take Star Child for sing-along before she started college, discover I can, walk to the library, get all excited at the thought of actually being able to read Inside Scientology and reach in my bag for my reading glasses, which I immediately realize (all four pairs) are back at #326.
I see a stack right there on the ground floor called New Books and stand there squinting at the spines but can't see the book in the Rs, so indulge in my new ask-for-help-when-you-need-it behavior and go to the desk with big circles over it saying Questions? and Answers. The almost frighteningly helpful to a New Yorker young woman behind the desk immediately pulls up three copies of it on the computer, tell me they're all Speed Reads, which I translate correctly to One Week Expresses, and offers to take me over to the stack where they are to get a copy. Feeling a little as though I need a white cane or a service dog, I follow along behind, and when we get to the books she brightly tells me one of them is already in general circulation so I won't need to have it back in a week, a good thing as I go to New York on Wednesday for three weeks and wouldn't have been able to finish it in three days.
Having managed to take my library card along, if not my glasses, I check out the book and tap my way down the street back to Harvard Square to take the T (how Bostonian is that?) to meet P at ICA, my first visit to the museum - any museum apart from the aquarium - since my zip code changed to 02138. We watch the one-hour film of Commercials, most of which I understand, some of which are funny, all of which are l-o-n-g, and then wander around the gift store with me picking objects up, waving the price tag under P's nose and saying "How much is this?"
The real trouble starts when we go to Legal Seafoods and are presented with a six page small type menu by a clone of the young woman behind the Questions? desk at the library. "Is there anything special I can help you with?" she says. "Yes," I say. "Do you have a spare pair of reading glasses anywhere for pitiful people who came out without theirs?" They don't, and she takes me seriously when I ask if she'll read the menu to me, but P obliges when I narrow it down a bit - "What isn't mahi-mahi, is fried and is under $25," and I don't need glasses to read the print on the packet of Walker's mince tarts that P has brought me for Christmas.
On the T on the way back from my Jupiterian (?) visit to the wilds of the Boston waterfront, I discover if I hold the library book just far enough away from my face and turn it at just the right angle to the light I can make out the print, and work my way through the first ten lines of the introduction by the time the train pulls into Harvard Square fifteen minutes later. This adventure in reading stops the minute I get back *home,* when I grab a pair of 2.0s, crawl under the covers in my little bed in the hallway and race through another ten lines before I fall asleep.
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