Eric Smith figures he’s in Dalhousie University’s Killam Library pretty much all day, about 325 days a year. I have no trouble believing him, any time I’ve gone there over the years, I’ve seen him, always at the same desk in the reference room.

He was in the same spot for more than six years, until renovations forced him out and he had to find a new perch. “I tried upstairs,” he says, laughing, “for about fifteen minutes. Too noisy.”

Now, Smith has a new regular table, in the atrium, where he can watch folks come and go and work away. He spreads his papers and books and bags all over a desk that could accommodate four studious people if they kept their elbows tucked in. “I need a big table for this hobby of mine,” he says. “Wanting lots of space is probably a holdover from being a schoolteacher and working with children.”

We sit outside the library as the sun burns away the morning fog, drinking coffee. Passing library staff nod to him. I tell him he’s the first person I’ve seen in one hundred years smoking menthol cigarettes. “My medication dries up my mouth,” he says, “and most times, I’ve got to suck a mint to smoke. Menthol helps.âe

Smith is researching election statistics, looking at shifts in voting patterns. He is interested in why people at the polls can change their votes suddenly. He says he’s talking about radical shifts, not the slow side-by-side slide when two-thirds of the vote goes to the Liberals in one election and to the Conservatives in the next.

I ask for an example.

“Well,” he says, “let’s see. The 1993 federal election. There was a huge change out West. The New Democrat Party (NDP) had held many seats for a long time, but that was the year the Reform Party had its breakout, and took a lot of those seats away.” The NDP went from forty-three seats to nine in 1993, and the Conservatives from one hundred and sixty-nine to two.

Smith’s work is also international. He spent two years studying voting patterns in India. And it’s never-ending. Right now, he’s got 150,000 pages of notes and charts, but he’s not looking to publish or finish. “I don’t want it to end,” he says, “then I’d just go home and do nothing, the way they did in the late ’80s.”

Smith is talking about the advice people who tested positive for HIV used to get “quit your job, go home and put your affairs in order.”

And, actually, AIDS is the excuse I have used to visit with Smith, specifically the tragedy of The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis & Malaria being about $12 billion-dollars short. But I am taken with this slight blond man, and his unrecognized labour, and his thick sweater, two T-shirts and five earrings. And we talk about many things.

I am taken with his labour, intrigued by his wealth of knowledge and copious notes and quiet humour. Hobby isn’t really the word for what is so far a labour of thirty-eight years that began with a Grade 10 history project. Maybe the word is vocation ’ but it isn’t job, either, because he isn’t paid or consulted for his work. I like it when someone known for something, like AIDS activism, turns out to have a true love much different.