What are YOU doing here?

We ran into a friend of ours last week in the cookbook aisle at the library, and for a moment I was confused. Friend? Here? We can say hi? And chit chat?

Someone I know? At the library? It's this place I go where I just wander around, avoiding eye contact because to me, native of a town of 2,000, I still find it weird and either lonely or liberating (depending on my mood) to go someplace and not know anyone there. So I daydream and I wander and I pick out books and movies and CDs and I go on my way, saying only "thanks" when the librarian hands back my card.

It's like when you see a former teacher at the supermarket after not having lived in that town for a while; "You don't belong in this compartment of my life. You should still be in the 1993 pile, stuck at St. Anthony's."

This is probably where I should divert and go into this speech about feeling a swelling sense of community when I saw my friend at the library. But I didn't really feel that. I was just more or less pleasantly surprised.