I JUST GOT BACK FROM MY PRINTER on the fourth floor of a building a 15-minute walk from my apt.  He gave me a proof of my newsletter which I’m finally getting around to doing. This is #62. But it’s been a long time since 61. Actually this one is an update of the last one. It’s about why I started holding the sign. For some people who see me holding it who might wonder. On the walk to the printer there were barricades everywhere. Police in big numbers on every block. Hard to get to where I was going. There’s a parade scheduled. And the president is at some event nearby. The messed-up streets and the vast security seemed hellish when I thought of him being close by.

‘I read my books with diligence, and mounting skill, and gathering certainty. I read the way a person might swim, to save his or her life.’
                               ― Mary Oliver, Upstream: Selected Essays

Now that the shoulder has been healing (at least six more months of physical therapy though) I can use both arms to hold the sign. For weeks I used just my right arm, my left arm limply hanging straight down. There was a Native American kid in my grade school in the 1950s who had an arm that was limp and hung at his side. You noticed it always. I was self-conscious about mine. Now I feel normal again, at least on that piece of the sidewalk on Chambers Street. I look forward to going back there tomorrow. I never don’t look forward to it.

I don’t comment on every day I’m there on Chambers Street with my sign that’s getting a bit ragged and will soon be replaced. Today was beautifully clear and a bit cold. I needed gloves for the first time this fall. The guy who goes by on an electric skate board had his knit cap pulled down over his ears. Kids on their way to pre-school were bundled up and had brand new colorful hats on. A few were on little Razor scooters. Some were with moms or dads; some were with nannies. Some adults who go by the sign can’t read it. Older Asian grandmothers can’t. Others too though, some American-born adults can’t. You wonder why the schools they were in let them get out with such limited literacy. Laws most places make you go to school for 10 years. Till you’re 16. You wonder what the schools were doing with those adults when they were young. For 10 years. 

If public libraries are not for the rich, they probably are not otherwise for the poor. To understand the public library as a benevolent form of welfare would be to entirely miss the radical potential of the institution as a political project. It isn’t utopian, nor is about culturing the masses, nor offering the marginalized a space where they mustn’t “pay for coffee.” Rather the public library stands for everyone occupying the same space in solidarity about the mysteries of existence that humble us all without distinction or prejudice. It is about renouncing all certainties—all except for one: that to stand in common is, in itself to establish a common ground on which to stand.
—-Andrew Schwartz, ‘A Night at the Library’, in The Baffler

I can’t know for sure if the sign’s message is moving anything. I know that some of the people who pass me and look at the sign smile in a way you seldom see on a sidewalk.

Weeks without really reading with my wrecked shoulder recovering in a painful way that kept my left arm hurting when in a book-or-newspaper-holding way. The Times that got delivered to my door on weekends I gave to the young neighbors with their little dog across the hall. I left magazines for them too. Just this weekend I once again kept both days’ papers for myself. I’d been thinking of canceling home delivery and reading everything on line but I couldn’t make that break. For almost 65 years I’ve read newspapers. My arm hurts just a little now. Today for the first time in weeks I took the paper with me to the Sunday breakfast place I go to. It felt good to sit there with my oatmeal and green tea and just one scrambled egg and no butter on my toasted English muffin and read the paper. I left my iPhone back in my apartment. Which felt good too. I have an almost-1000-page book I think I can hold now. I think I’ll start it tomorrow.