After school he is supposed to come straight home. Stay in the apartment, his father says. And do your homework. But today he does not follow the path. He turns onto Broadway, follows it out toward the high school, where he’ll have to go in a few years, toward the big public library beside it, where he has never been.
From liber, his father has told him. Books. Which comes from the word meaning the inner bark of trees, which comes from the word for to strip, to peel. Early peoples pulled off the thin strips for writing material, of course.
A fall walk, once. His father’s hands had brushed the flaking birch bark, rising paper-white in curls from the slender trunk.
But I like to think of it as peeling back layers. Revealing layers of meaning.
Bird?
He is so touched by this that it doesn’t occur to him until much later: to wonder how she knows his name.
