The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

The South End Little Library has suffered more than its share of indignities since its grand opening a year or so ago. Vandals the first week tossed books from their shelves in the GTE repurposed phone booth, burned a few, then painted obscenities on the glass windows. Bringing literacy to the denizens of the backwashes here, I realized as head librarian, was going to be no easy task. But really, book burning? It wasn’t as if the burnt volumes were controversial. One was a child’s book about a rabbit and … well, it was hard to decipher through the burnt cover. So who knows, maybe a gay rabbit. Or a rabbit that used curse words. Or an atheist rabbit. Or these illiterates just didn’t like rabbits.

A few months ago the shelves were pulled out of the booth and the books strewn across the lawn to spend a soggy night in the rain before I discovered the mayhem, too late for about six dozen books. For a week I closed the library, put up a sign that the closure was due to vandalism, then debated with myself whether to restock the shelves. No good deed goes unpunished down in this neck of the dark woods. Ignorance is bliss, they tell me, and maybe I was trying to bring my own brand of religion to the unwashed masses who already had Trump to worship.

My little park, a five acre tract with some nice firs and cedars along its trails, is a magnet for garbage disposal, midnight trysts and miscreant hidey-holes. We’ve had broken glass strewn across the parking area, camouflaged pits dug back in the woods with sharpened sticks waiting for unwary hikers, staging areas for stolen goods hidden in the brush, used condoms tossed nightly. Trees and shrubs I’ve planted have been dug up and stolen. Sculptures have been swiped, grills purloined, rocks thrown into the grassy areas to make mowing a shrapnel nightmare. Being the head ranger has been a study in negative human behavior.

So when I went over a few days ago to mow and found the window of the library smashed out with a bottle, I can’t say I was very surprised. No doubt the work of anitfa, left wing radicals and those pesky anarchists tired of looting the urban swamps. Federal troops would likely be mobilized to help me guard this place now, good news. Although library use would probably hit rock bottom. Price you pay for Stormtroopers protecting the Homeland, I guess.
After mowing I went home, got rakes and brooms and returned to clean up the mess. Sure, I grumbled, I whined, I shook my fist. But what are you gonna do? Indeed. Right now I have a hole in my little biblioteca where the rain and the wind can come through. I’m thinking maybe boarding it up rather than replace the glass for future missile throwers. Paint something on it maybe. You know, see if art can soothe the savage beasts on the barbarian South End. I know, fat freakin chance.

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