Just a quick word here since my time on this computer is limited and the spacebar sticks something awful, and the mouse has no mousewheel and it drives me slightly bonkers.
It is Tuesday, December 9th 2008, and I am sitting in the Tiffin-Seneca Public Library. I am in Tiffin for the purpose of burying my paternal grandmother, Gertrude, in what seems likely to be my last trip to Tiffin for quite some time, I should think. I am sitting at public terminal #13, in a library where I don’t think I ever expected to see more than 4 computers. I remember playing my first computer games on the public machine here, the educational Gertrude’s Goose stands out in memory just now, but of course probably Oregon Trail and several Carmen Sandiego games were played as well. The last time I sat on a computer here I believe was either the summer of 1999 or over winter break 98-99. In either case I was here to communicate and possibly play chess with college friends whom I missed. Currently I am here because I arrived in Tiffin two hours early for the funeral and I have nowhere else to really go except to drive about town listlessly and look at how it has changed, a task I will no doubt get on with shortly after my half-hour of computer time expires.
When I came into the library today, I found the computers and saw that a library card number was required to log in, and so I inquired at the front desk about my status as a card holder. It seems I still have a card here, and they pulled out my registration sheet to update the information on it. It was so old that my father’s information was also on there, with his signature (I recognized it upside down across the desk) giving me permission to check out items from the library. This amuses me greatly, that this file is still there. The librarian behind the circulation desk is no stranger to me, but I didn’t let on that I recognized her from a decade and a half ago.
Apart from the replacement of the card catalog with digital terminals (finally!), the library is still pretty much as I remember it from 10 years ago. Crazy crazy.
Although the timer up top tells me that I have 17 minutes remaining on this machine, I think I will leave it at this and head back out into the rain, to muddle about Tiffin and sigh and think of my grandmother and my dad and the town in general.
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