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Rodney Smitherspoon IV
All of my life I have reminded people of someone they know. In my 20 years as a librarian I've resembled several co-workers. This can create confusion for the patrons, but the most embarrassing time is when Rodney Smitherspoon IV mistook me for Connie.
I was in my mid-twenties at the time. My skin was fair and my hair was dark. I wore it waist length and to anyone who had just come up to the desk, Connie looked the same. If you looked at us in more depth, one would have noticed that I was pencil thin by comparison. My eyes were dark brown while Connie's were green and I wore my hair in a French braid, with bangs and Connie wore hers in a pony-tail with "wings" on either side of her face. Also, if anyone had talked to us they would have noted that while I had a flat mid-western accent, Connie spoke in a country drawl.
One would suppose that Rodney Smitherspoon IV would have noticed these differences because he was madly in love with Connie, but Rodney always was an odd duck. His favorite book to read was Mein Kampf, which he checked out, renewed it, returned it for the required one day, then started the whole process again. He requested many strange books and asked that we not let his mother know what we had in for him when we called. He was around thirty, tall, husky, with a scruffy beard and he always wore the same shirt and overalls. Every time he came in he headed straight for Connie if she was at the front desk, or he asked about her if she wasn't. If I was at the front desk and Connie wasn't he'd come over to me and start with "Connie..." To which I would quickly reply, "I'm not Connie."
One afternoon he came in when I was at the front desk and Connie was in the work room directly behind me. It was about lunch time and so the library was full of people who run errands during their break. He came right up to me at the front desk and started talking to me, even though I was helping another patron.
This particular afternoon he didn't address me as Connie, else we might have avoided everything that followed. What he did say was, "Have you ever seen anyone having an epileptic fit?"
I replied, "No.""I have epileptic fits every now and then and I feel one coming on now. They aren't severe, so usually if someone just holds me during it, then that's all I need." With that he walked over to a sofa that was next to the front desk and sat down. He began to tremble and then he hollered out, "Hold me Connie, hold me!"
I froze. What was I to do? I wasn't going to make Connie come out of the back room and subject her to holding him, and if I didn't go to him, all of the people that were standing at or near the front desk would think that I was a heartless person because they didn't know what he was like. The thought of holding him made me ill and frightened.
I'd just gotten up on shaking legs when I heard the voice of our assistant librarian coming in the back door of our work room. She was coming back from lunch. I flew into the back room and told Maxine what was happening. She hugged me and said "I'll take care of this Sweetie." Maxine went out to the front desk and then over to the sofa where Rodney sat trembling and whimpering "Connie, Connie." She sat next to him and put her arms around him and soothed, "It'll be o.k." Rodney looked at his beloved Connie and instead saw a sweet elderly face that looks like those dried apple people. His fit ended abruptly. He got up and left.