ZapTown

I had some genuine things I wanted to say about Robert Silverberg’s landmark Science Fiction novel Dying Inside, honest to dog I did, but they’ll have to wait another week. Last week was a bit rough for your humble scribe for reasons not connected to the internet, and at one point, something happened that caught me off-guard. I’d like to share it with you, in case you have any thoughts on it.

See, for one reason or another, as I was having a very busy, somewhat rough week, I found myself in a public waiting room. The kind without music, where everyone’s doing their best to ignore each other. Maybe a few toys in the corner for kids, if they’re lucky, but other than that. And so, as I thought I was going to be there for a while, I browsed the magazines for adults. Nothing. Golf Weekly, 100 High-Fiber Recipes, Estonian Geographic, magazines like that. I checked the children’s section, and they had some books, including an abridged version of L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz. Now, I haven’t read the novel in a while, but when I was a pre-pubescent, I was a big Oz-nick. Had the map of Oz and surrounding environs on my wall. Even tried to read most of the Ruth Plumly Thompson books, which were pretty good. Hey, I still think Return to Oz is an underrated children’s film. So I picked up the book and took it back to my chair, thinking I might be a while. I was halfway to the Emerald City when a lady came in, sat down in a chair close to mine, looked over at what I was reading, and gave me this stare of something akin to raw horror.

Look, uh, I’m not that frightning, honest I’m not. I wasn’t wearing a torn raincoat or a clown costume or a black robe. Just a normal guy, picked up a kid’s book because the alternative was reading about 20 great ways to defeat the sand trap. I thought, post-Harry Potter, post-Lord of the Rings and all that, that there was less of a stigma with adults reading children’s books, and/or fantasy in public.

Going by the evil eye the woman was making, I may have been a little naive. It’s strictly anecdotal, so there’s no proof, but I’m tempted to perform an experiment: Take a full-color illustrated version of Wizard of Oz, find a public bench somewhere–a bus stop, maybe, or a train station, and sit there for an hour or two, when I have the time, reading it conspicuously, and making silent note of the reaction of bystanders. Because it can’t be that awful for a grown man in a public place to be browsing a beloved classic children’s novel, can it? It’s not as though I was reading Flowers of Evil or some such, is it? I’m hoping the woman was just having a bad day, and there was something about my manner that bothered her. The alternative is kind of a downer to contemplate.

Maybe if I’d been reading The Lost Symbol, that wouldn’t have been as traumatic for her. In truth, I’ve had the red flags that books can raise on my mind, the last few days. I’d like to talk about that a little more, next time, as well as Silverberg’s remarkable novel, and some of the points surrounding it.