Eating Your Expectations

You know how when you've gotta do something important...like write or study, or have an important talk, you can think of a hundred other things to do before you do it? Worst of all these is the hunger. When all else fails, and all procrastinates are out of the way, in kicks the hunger.

Imagine my surprise, then, upon entering the reading room at the New York Public Library. Mind you, I've been romancing about this place since I was old enough to dream of books and broad tables, marble and storied ceilings, and pages turning in the collective quiet.

I'm here. I've passed the SWAT guys with machine guns at the front door (can you believe? now that's value placed on books), made a tour, used the ladies' room, and passed three posts of internal library security to enter this innermost chamber. I ogle, I saunter, I finally sit. I open my backpack, my books. Ready my pen. I'm full. Full of New York, full of anticipation, full of age. I'm ready.

It smells like bread baking in here. Are they piping it in? Warm, sweet bread.

Can they be serious?

My pen stares at my page, totally indifferent.

Is it coming from outside? No. It's a warm, inside scent. It's soft and inviting and not exactly dusty, more dusted, with honeydust. It is croissant-scent laced with the promise of marzipan.

The page yawns, blank. My pen looks up at me like a Basset hound.

I get up to ask the nice security man who checked my bag on the way in, "Does it always smell like this in here?" He looks vaguely like a Basset hound, too. He regales me with the charm and mystery of this daily, eternal scent. I picture parchment pages between aging leather bindings, on shelves of aromatic wood housed in beautiful marble with great care.

I return to my chair...heavy wood to match the table. Pen sidles up to paper.

No, it's Grandpa's homemade bread that would rise in a dark corner in its crock for hours till he baked it and we died and went to Heaven with every bite.

I'm in the New York Public Library. I'm a writer. An adult. I made it. I have time enough on my hands to be that. Do that. Be here.

I want a pastry.