It's a fireplace kind of day around here with a thick gray sky and a continuing iteration between cold rain and chilly drizzle. The 47˚ temperature feels as if 37˚and the raindrops sounded as if sleet on my windshield as I drove into town. (I like that charmingly protective but dimensionally limited term, wind-shield.) There is very little that I can do today and I can't think of any satisfyingly pleasant place to go. I'd headed to the library imagining it might be warmer and cozier than in this house (without a fireplace) and with a good room to hang out, use the Internet and, finally with free time, catch up on a lot of bookmarked, OneTabbed and SavedToPocket reading. But the chairs were too low at the tables making me curl my back to hunch forward toward my computer, and the floor felt cold. I left after a couple of hours to come home to sit erectly at this high table in the kitchen with my feet over the electric space heater below. This pleasurable yet not fully satisfying place, solo so not social, made me realize that a key missing ingredient in this small town is an old, classic, lodge-type hotel. One with a great fireplace, comfortable wing-backed chairs, a small bar and a good grill, a place to be both solo and social, attracting a changing cast of local and seasonal characters with friendly gossip, and strangers sailing in from foreign lands with tales of adventure. Indeed, one of the things the town does have is a protected and picturesque harbor where large cruisers dock and some majestic sailing yachts anchor. Most are now gone, however, to winter in some boatyard somewhere or are making their way through the St.Lawrence seaway to sail down the continental coast to warmer waters south of here. The charming and social harbor of Summer now looks cold and hard, utilitarian and underused. In a minor succession of library arrivals, I did see and talk with a couple of the regular coffee-house geezers (I've missed taking my own part in that scene for most of the Summer). Mark said Mel fell recently and has a big black eye. Don arrived later and sat at a chair near me and, with the Wall Street Journal in his lap, spoke into his phone asking questions like, "What is the population of Lithuania?" (I love that, by the way, using the library to speak into a phone to do research. That's like me going there to use its internet to read digital versions of saved articles probably in print somewhere here.) When I mentioned Mark's news to Don, he said that he and Mel were the senior members of the community and that he, Don, is a year older than Mel. He said he'd told Mel that he hopes he (Mel) will live 'til he's 100 years old … and then he (Don) will attend his funeral. Hehheh. I use the library primarily for internet service, which I do not have at the house. Before I left there today, though, I cruised through the physical stacks. Most of the small collection is surprisingly rather sophisticated. I was amused, though, with the realization that a significant part of the collection consisted of large-type editions. A significant proportion of those were mysteries. This is a retirement town.
