Streak Bear
anti-streak — protecting readers from the rush of consecutive days
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The first thing Maya understood, after about two years of visiting the Library, was that Streak Bear was not actually a bear.
He looked like a bear. He had the small embroidered vest and the round glasses and the slow, deliberate way of looking at you that you'd expect of a bear who had been on a porch a long time. But the longer Maya knew him, the more she understood that the bear-ness was a kind of disguise. Underneath the vest and the sandwiches and the slow afternoon snoring was something more like a position — a quiet, immovable position about what a library should be — and Streak Bear had taken on the shape of a bear because it was easier to defend the position from inside that shape than from outside it.
She was thirteen when she first thought this.
She was fourteen when she asked him about it.
It was a long afternoon in late summer. The porch boards were warm under her hands. Streak Bear was eating a peach. He had been eating it for nearly ten minutes, the way he ate everything, which was at the speed of a person who had decided long ago that the pleasure of eating a peach was worth more than the productivity of having finished one.
"Streak," she said, "you're not really a bear, are you."
He did not stop eating.
"I am a bear in the same way the Library is a library," he said. "Which is to say: the shape and the function are the same thing. If I were not a bear I could not do this job. The bear-ness is not a costume. It is part of how the job works."
Maya thought about that.
"Why a bear, though? You could have been... I don't know. A librarian. Like Alcuin."
"Alcuin's job is to choose. Mine is to welcome. Those are different shapes. A librarian is a person who knows things. A bear is a person who decides to stay. You need a different kind of body for staying than you need for knowing."
"Decides to stay where?"
"Here. On the porch. Through every season. Through every reader. Through the days you come and the days you don't. The whole job is the staying."
He took another small careful bite of peach.
"It is harder than it looks," he added.
The thing Maya had not understood, when she was younger, was that Streak Bear had had to fight to be allowed to be a bear.
She found this out from Alcuin, who told her on a rainy day when Maya had been asking too many of the right questions to brush off.
There had been pressure, Alcuin said, decades ago, when Streak Bear was newly arrived and the Library was newer than it was now. The pressure had come from the regular places — administrators, well-meaning donors, people who had read articles about how children learned best when they were given clear targets and consistent rewards. The pressure had said: put up a chart. Put up gold stars. Let kids see their progress. Give them a reason to come every day.
Streak Bear had said no.
He had said no quietly, the way he said most things, but he had also said no with the kind of immovable position that did not bend. He had said: if you put up the chart, I leave the porch. If I leave the porch, you have a library with a chart and no welcoming. You will, eventually, have a library with a chart and no readers either, because the chart is not the welcoming. The chart is the avoidance of breaking. The avoidance of breaking is a bad engine for learning. It is the engine that produces tired children who are afraid of missing a day. I will not be the wall that holds up that engine. I am a bear. I do not do disappointment. I do welcome. Those are the only two things in my job description, and disappointment is not one of them.
He had not raised his voice.
The administrators had thought about it for some weeks.
The chart had not gone up.
That was twenty-eight years ago. Streak Bear had been on the porch every season since. The Library had readers — many of them, including Maya — who came on the days they came, and missed on the days they missed, and trusted that the porch would be there either way.
Alcuin had told Maya this story on the rainy day, and Maya had walked outside afterward and sat on the steps with Streak Bear in silence for almost an hour, eating slices of an apple he had cut for her.
"You knew Alcuin would tell me eventually," she said.
"Mm."
"Was it scary? Saying no to all those people?"
Streak Bear considered the question for so long that Maya thought he might have fallen asleep.
Then he said, slowly: "It was not scary. It was something I had to decide once. After that it was just staying decided. Staying decided is easier than people think. The hard part is the first decision. Once the decision is made, the bear's body remembers it. The rest is just the days."
"Most people don't get to make decisions like that."
"That's true. That's why I have to keep making this one. Some bears have to be the wall for the bears who are not allowed to be."
Maya nodded.
She did not really understand it yet.
She would understand it in pieces over the next few years.
The story was not over.
Two years after that conversation, when Maya was sixteen, her cousin Sebastian arrived at the porch having missed almost four months at his own library. He had broken his streak. He had broken his streak because he had been sick, then because he had been busy, then because he had been afraid of going back. The fear had grown. The fear had become the whole story. He had not gone back to his own library, with its chart and its gold stars, in one hundred and twelve days.
He had come to Maya. He had asked if there was a different kind of library. Maya had brought him here.
They walked up the porch steps together. Streak Bear was reading.
He looked up.
"Oh, hello," he said. "Nice to see you. Come on in."
Sebastian froze.
"You don't know me," he said.
"That is correct. Come on in anyway."
"I haven't been to a library in a hundred and twelve days."
"That is okay."
"I broke my streak."
Streak Bear took off his glasses, polished them on a corner of his vest, put them back on, and looked at Sebastian with a kind of warmth Maya had seen turned on her a hundred times now and never gotten used to.
"There are no streaks here," he said. "Come on in."
Sebastian started to cry. Quietly. The kind of crying that comes from a place that has been carrying something too heavy for too long.
Streak Bear waited.
After a while, Sebastian wiped his face and went inside.
Maya stood on the porch a moment longer. She looked at Streak Bear.
"You're the wall," she said.
"Mm."
"You're the wall the other walls can't be."
Streak Bear nodded once, slowly.
"That is most of the job," he said. "Welcome is the rest."
He went back to his book.
The AlcumusForge ensemble
Streak Bear is part of AlcumusForge's distributed-narrative cast. Each character embodies a different curricular primitive; together they teach the full subject.
