Back when...

I am a big fan of Louis L'amour. I grew up on his Westerns as a kid in India. I would regularly bicycle to a small library a few kilometers from my house. It was really a rectangular, dusty room that always looked like a tornado had just gone through it. For the most part, I was the only person there. Sometimes I visited after school. Sometimes I would go weekend mornings, rent a book and finish it in a couple of hours if it were a small Western and maybe in 5 or 6 hours if it were a bigger book (like a Robert Ludlum or Frederick Forsyth novel). Then I would go back again immediately after.



The library was owned by an old man with red and black colored teeth. He was always chewing betel leaves. Once I took a couple of friends with me and one of them pinched a book. He wasn't going to read it. He had done it for the thrill of it. Anyway, I didn't feel too good about it. I didn't encourage my friends to go to the library with me after that time. I did, however, eventually end up striking a friendship with that old man over a period of three years (from 9th through 11th grade), a period during which I used the library almost everyday.

I rarely visited the library during 12th grade. I was spending a lot of time in a gym, taking lone trips to the countryside on my bicycle and trying not to be too distracted by girls. Then one day in '93, high school was suddenly over and I left for the United States shortly after. I didn't go back to India until 2000, when I looked the old man up. He was still in that old chair. He looked up at me through thick glasses with his mouth open. He didn't recognize me at first. Then he broke into a toothless grin. He held out both arms from his seated position,

"Gopi!!"

I had originally planned to stop by for a few minutes but ended up chatting with him for close to an hour. The library looked the same as always...like a tornado had just gone through it. When I visited India again in 2004, it was gone. I never saw the old man again.

Here are 4 lines often used in a Louis L'amour novel:

4. He was a big man, wide at the shoulders and lean at the hips.
3. "Pa always told me that a man..."
2. "The coffee was strong".

And the number 1 line...

1. "I made coffee".

Yeah, I still read 'em :-)