Investigating the Loss of the Card Catalog
from the LRC (formerly known as the Library)

The Card Catalog is gone!

I can understand how one might lose a book or two,
especially in a place called LRC,
but this?

row on row of labelled drawers:
AA -- ARQ nested just above ARR -- AXI,
and thirty feet away, down low and to the right,
YTT -- ZYG.

(ARQ led me to the card that said
ARQUEBUS, The History of the.)

All those hardwood cabinets,
gleaming walnut,
glowing golden oak,
the drawers so well-wrought
they never stuck.

That scent, that subtle blend
of wood and ancient index cards. . .
you couldn't slip that past a blind man.

Come on, I mean,
it had to be an inside job.

If someone asked me when the loss occurred,
I'd have to say:

Sometime between Saigon and Baghdad.
I'm certain "I Love Lucy" had gone off.
I'm sure that it was after Pac-Man.
Maybe it was just before
PlayStation II.

Hell, I don't know.

I just looked up one day
and it was gone.

I'd ask the lady at the check-out desk
to tell me what she knows
except she's eyeing me that way again.

(The day I checked out three --
John Calvin's Later Years,
Satyrs and Nymphs, and
The Diet of Wurms and other Tales --
that's the day she started watching me
suspiciously. . .and ever since.)

And yet I can imagine marching up,
brimming over with authority,
seething with suspicion,
armed to the teeth
with rapier and ARQuebus.
I'd demand to know the truth:

"The catalog!
Where did it go?"

"Ask Maintenance or House-Keeping.
They should know."

God damn it!
Indeed they should.

-- Warren F. O'Rourke, 2004