The memories stay put, even if we don't

The Boston Herald

Beverly Beckham

It occurred to me as I was sitting in the Great Hall in Codman Square, Dorchester Thursday morning, a guest at a breakfast celebrating this treasure's 100th anniversary, that a building really is more than brick and wood and everything it takes to hold it together. And it's not just sentiment that draws us back to a place.

Sure, we come back to places to say, ``This is the house where I grew up.'' Or ``This is my old school.'' Or ``This was my library.'' But usually we come back because there's something of ourselves, and others, that was left behind.

Just as fingerprints leave their mark, so do people's spirits. It takes an expert to come along and dust for prints because they can't be seen. But in the end, a one-of-a-kind thumbprint is proof a person was here and touched things.

There's no way to prove - not yet, anyway - that people touch us with their spirits, too. That they leave behind their energy, good or bad. But they do. You can feel it sometimes. You walk into a house and you can feel when there's love there.

And you can feel when there isn't.

Some part of what was, who knows how, must get into the air or the wood or molecules. Because what's left behind is something that we can't see, but that we, sometimes, can feel.

I felt that something at a breakfast in a building I hadn't spent time in for 45 years. The Great Hall used to be the Codman Square Library, where I spent hours each week while I was in 7th and 8th grade. I was a commuter student at St. Mark's. The other kids went home for their hour-and-a-half lunch because they lived in the parish. My home was too far away. So I walked to the library every day.

I expected to run into the ghosts of my childhood during my visit back. I expected to see the girl I was, ugly uniform and all, sitting on the floor in the alcove behind the main desk, reading.

And I did. In memory, I saw her clear as day.

But what I didn't expect was that I would feel more than my own decades-old experience. And that I would feel as safe in this place now as I did when I was a girl.

The Codman Square library closed its doors in 1975. The building was abandoned by the city and might have been torn down. But Bill Walczak, a man with a vision, came along and opened a health center there.

The health center eventually moved next door. And the building was restored. Now, in the Great Hall, which used to be the library's main, stately entrance, students from a charter school eat lunch every day, community groups meet and actors get to perform on a new stage.

For 100 years, all kinds of people have come to this building hungering for something and gone away full.

I hungered for a sanctuary and I found it here. I hungered to be someone else. And I was. I was every person in every book this building allowed me to read.

A few people shared their hungers and their memories at the breakfast. One man talked about coming to the library for warmth on winter days, going there right after school, and coming back right after dinner. Another remembered meeting Huckleberry Finn. Another recalled stacking books.

The stories were all the same - a simple recitation of ``what this building means to me.''

A teacher at the Codman Academy Charter School talked about the young people who use the Great Hall today, and how this grand old building remains important to a new generation.

Thousands have come to this building in need of something. And thousands have found what they needed and taken it away with them.

You would think the building would be hollow from giving so much.

But it's full, instead. Because as much as people take, they leave part of themselves, sometimes a big part, behind.