Riding the Magic Stairs to 1967

It is said that every seven years our cells are completely replaced. If this is so, my memory cells have passed on the smell of these rubber stair treads to five new generations.

Whoosh -- Totem Park Cafeteria, 1967. Having scarfed down a Salisbury steak with two veg while my roommate ostentatiously gnawed on “rubber cheese,” the only vegetarian option, I am heading upstairs to my room. Later, walking to the library where I will shelve books, I pass the recently constructed bell tower, which the boys call “Ladner’s last erection,” daring us to be shocked. 

I climb the granite steps and enter through the ornate main doors. How wonderful to be seventeen and have my whole life before me, as my mother never tires of saying. The fragrance of wooden card catalogue drawers, slightly sour, and the dusty papery smells of the stacks are still exotic, new.

Sorting cutlery in the residence kitchen, I wear my sweatshirt with Amor vincit omnia, love conquers all, embroidered on it crookedly in red wool. A middle-aged kitchen worker who can speak little English can apparently read this bad Latin. He chases me round the lounge, and I beat a rapid retreat down over the rubber-topped stairs.

Visiting friends on other floors, we aspiring hippies negotiate these stairs many times a day, and the new rubber treads sting our bare feet. After somber conversations about the existential alienation of Camus or Sartre, and commiseration over looming essay deadlines, our soles are also in pain.

Down over those same stairs I run out at dusk with my new friend to see the daffodils in Marine Foreshore Park. Finding the grass freshly mown, we lie down and roll in it, bubbling over with laughter. Then we race back up to our rooms, dripping grass clippings in the stairwell.

Now, forty years later, climbing the polished granite stairs of the Bennett Library, I catch a whiff of the same rubbery smell in the stairwell. No doubt these identical treads were installed during the same era. As I arrive at my floor and open the glass door, the rows of dusty stacks assail me with memories. This is not just a library. It is a time machine.