I love visiting the library. One of the most delightful services our library offers is the ability to search for and reserve a book online at its Web site. You find the book you want, they pull it for you and place it on the “Reserved” shelf with your individual “Reservation” code number placed inside the book. The shelves are clearly marked “Reserved”; the tag sticking out of your book is clearly marked “Reserved”; there is even what is clearly a personal ID number on the tag, just in case someone wasn’t sure that the book had been “Reserved” for another patron. This is a fine system, designed to inform those people not in the position of being me that they should shove off and find something else (i.e., “Not-Reserved”)  to read.

Today, I took time out of my busy schedule to go to the library to pick up my “Reserved” book, one for which I’d been waiting and was very much looking forward to beginning reading. However, when I arrived at the library, said book was gone. No trace of it anywhere.

What an outrage! What disappointment! Quel dommage! The sudden and overwhelming deflation of my anticipation summoned childhood memories of being able to smell the cookies baking in my mother’s kitchen, only to find that they were intended for the bake sale, and thus, infuriatingly off-limits for me.

I followed the helpful but bewildered librarian around like a lost, demented puppy: “Maybe someone left it on a table?” “Perhaps it fell behind the shelf?” “Maybe someone checked it out by mistake?–could you give me their address? I’d be happy to kill–I mean, contact them.” But all was to no avail. I’d gotten my mouth all set up for Nabokov but would return home empty-handed and dejected, all because one vile individual disregarded my Reservation.

I find it hard to believe that someone patronizing a library does not have the literacy skills needed in order to understand what the word “Reserved” means, but perhaps I need to expand my belief system a trifle.  On the other hand, perhaps, right at this moment, someone is curled up in a cozy nook next to a roaring fire, settling in to read my reserved copy of said book, leaving me–well, I was going to say enraged, but I’ll just settle for tremendously peeved, as well as for wishing the evil book thief in question ferocious heartburn from the milk and cookies.

I’ll be watching for you at the library…