I am Patricia Eileen Johnson, I am of a certain age–an age that allows me to be partially retired right now, with good health, an avid curiosity, many interests, and enough disposable income for me to be able to dabble in many of the things I am curious about. I have been wanting an outlet for the writing I have desired to do my whole life. Ever since my grandmother, Mary Leahy, late of Billerica, Massachusetts, took me to the library for the first time in Woburn, Massachusetts, I have been a bibliophile. I can still, to this day some 50 years later, smell how the enormous children’s section of the Woburn Public Library smelled. Of old books, and polished wooden floors. Of quiet, and adventure, and excitement–for who knew what you would find to take you away in your imagination on this trip to this magical place? Would it be Pippi Longstocking, that red-pigtailed girl who did things you could only dream of? Or the Bobbsey Twins, with their picture perfect family, off to the beach or the farm? Or poor Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch, with her many children and even more woes? Whatever you could dream of, the library had a book to take you there. There was no place I would rather be when I was growing up. And I still find it magical and entrancing and capitavating. Like a starving man at a free buffet, I find that my eyes are bigger than my stomach, as my mother used to say. I cannot possibly read all the books I simply must have in the three weeks alloted to me. But I cannot leave them there on the shelves! I must have them by my side, available, waiting for me to open their covers and lose myself in their pages.
Stumbling Toward the Divine
"Ring the bells that still can ring, forget your perfect offering. There is a crack in everything–that's how the light gets in." Leonard Cohen
