A Mecca of a Library

Miami is a city of concrete. The swamps were sucked out, long ago, the retirees went elsewhere, up north, and so every day it is more a real-life combat situation with drivers, with restaurants, anxiety on all sides, and nary a moment to really enjoy the world, to bask in it all.
Unless you walk it, of course. The walk from Little Havana, the middle of Calle Ocho, to Downtown, to Government Station, to the mecca of literature in Miami: The Downtown Library.
For years, I stayed dormant, in a sense: just school, home, school, home. But, one day, I decided to walk from my home to the Downtown Library, a place I had visited in my childhood, but now it had dawned on me.

Walking down those twenty city blocks, sweltering heat and endless concrete blocks, that is, until you hit the bridge, rickety-steel and ocean blue, overlooking brown waters, with still yachts and little fishing boats lying on the waves, as I raced across it, to make it to the Library in semi-pieces.
I call the Downtown Library a Mecca because it stands in such contrast to the rest of Downtown: it is raised in architecture, across from it is HistoryMiami (museum of Miami and its history), and that it winds around the whole of the two-story building, and once you step inside, what a world of difference: calm, cool, floor after floor after floor of books and movies and computers, and all the people.
But, I’m getting a bit ahead of myself here. The one striking thing about this library, beyond just the vastness of it, vast enough to have use the elevator two times over to find anything, is the fact that everyone is so welcome here: homeless come in at all hours, and play chess and eat their food in the far corners, next to Shakespeare and Tolstoy. Everyone wants to help you out, to find out what book you want, and if you linger long enough, you’ll forget about the outside world and all its anxieties, especially the Miami humidity, and the cold AC and the weathered book smell of time is so welcoming.
More than anything, more than the blueprints and mementos of Florida’s past, of Miami’s past, is of walking up to the Annotated “Howl” by Allen Ginsberg, and leaving a poem of mine inside of the book: as a tribute, from one Miami kid in a Miami library across the sands of time. This is a library that, from the top floor down, you can see the world.