The Isolation Journals - Day 10

Double digits, baby.  Can't stop, won't stop.

Today's prompt is short and direct.  It comes from author Elizabeth Gilbert. 

Prompt:  Write about a time where you were dead wrong about someone.

We were way off about Walter White

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My husband and I are both librarians.

I'll wait.  I hear you thinking cats, eyeglasses, buns, tweed, books piled everywhere.  

You're not wrong.

The thing is, though, we weren't born this way.  We have gradually leaned into these stereotypes over the last decade.  Andy is an expert in his field and one of the smartest people I know, and besides that he just looks academic.  That wasn't always the case, though.  In fact, when we met, I thought he was a real mimbo.

At the time, I was a clerk in a high school library.  On a rainy professional development day, I was working alone when the phone rang.  The middle school librarian wanted to know if I had time to help her son find a few books about mountaineering.  

Surely the son of a librarian should know how to use the Dewey Decimal System, but whatever, I'm not busy.  I was expecting a young kid, perhaps a teenager.  

A few minutes later, a good-looking bearded guy trudged in through the side door, his raincoat and faded Phillies hat dripping wet.  I didn't recognize him, but figured he was a teacher since he entered the locked door with his access card.  I waved to be polite and went back to stamping new books.  I wondered when the kid would show up.

The dude approached my desk and said Hey, my mom called...about the mountaineering books?

Exsqueeze me, Garth?

This grown-ass man is the son who can't find his own books?  This man who has been to college, whose own mother is a librarian, doesn't know how to look up and locate books in a library??  Is he actually that dumb?  How did this jabroni even find his way across the parking lot?  Is this some kind of joke?

It turns out it was a joke, of sorts.  A set-up.  His mother and my boss sent him on a mission to talk to me.  The books were merely a cover, a conversation starter.  

Joke's on me, because here we are 12 years later, closing in on our 10th wedding anniversary.  We've survived grad school, 4 cross-country moves, a tornado, and now a quarantine.  After all this time, I suppose I forgive him for pretending to be an idiot, although he does still ask me to fetch his library books...