Theme Thursday: Library

If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need. – Cicero

A book is like a garden carried in the pocket. – Chinese Proverb

Library
by Valerie Worth

No need even
To take out
A book: only
Go inside
And savor
The heady
Dry breath of
Ink and paper,
Or stand and
Listen to the
Silent twitter
Of a billion
Tiny busy
Black words.

-From All the Small Poems and Fourteen More. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1994, p. 163. taken from poetryforchildren.blogspot.com 10/23/2006

I would say that it has been the library that has saved me. Not just once, but over and over, in different towns and cities down the decades.

The first one I remember going to was on Long Island, and it seems that it was housed in a basement, because I don't remember any windows. But I do remember getting my first library card there. It had a little metal strip on it that must have been used to make an impression on something—the cards in the books? I can't remember.

Anyone who says they have only one life to live must not know how to read a book. – Author Unknown

In elementary school, during the summer, I spent a good deal of time in the Children's Room (in the building, above). For a painfully shy child, the library opens a door to swirling worlds where the words on the page sometimes can't keep up with the images in the mind. Read Thimble Summer, if you haven't. Chapter 5, "Locked In," is about being so caught up in reading that two girls don't even realize that the librarian has locked up and gone home for the night. That author also created the wonderful Melendy family. The Edward Eager books; LM Boston's Green Knowe series (I was lucky enough to visit the actual house and meet Lucy Boston's daughter-in-law); EC Spykman's Cares family (if any one knows where to get a copy of The Wild Angels, let me know); Eleanor Estes; Eleanor Farjeon's The Little Bookroom . . . well, I could go on.

High school: I would spend many an afternoon downstairs in the To Be Discarded section of the Bellevue Avenue branch, reading all sorts of odd ball books. I could never get a job there, though, as library jobs were the most coveted. (I cleaned houses instead.) However, since 7th grade, L has been lucky enough to have volunteered every other Saturday in our local library up here.

A university is just a group of buildings gathered around a library. – Shelby Foote

College; the library was a good place to hide out, way upstairs in the stacks, reading instead of doing whatever assignment was due.

Libraries are reservoirs of strength, grace and wit, reminders of order, calm and continuity, lakes of mental energy, neither warm nor cold, light nor dark. . . . In any library in the world, I am at home, unselfconscious, still and absorbed. – Germaine Greer

When L was just a kindergartner, I worked at the library in the next town over as the library assistant. The Librarian, who truly truly put the patrons first in everything, was nevertheless a Luddite who refused to get rid of the card catalog and hid the computer in the basement until the last possible moment. I think a library trustee struggled up the stairs with it. But after it was set up, it was hidden away in the most inconvenient part of the building. Even now, when I went to the library's web site for this post, I found that it is still "under construction." Ha! Every patron had his or her own library number, and most people were affronted if I didn't know theirs by heart. So I soon learned.

That library was all things—the hand-off spot for divorced parents, a rendez-vous point for various dates, studying, political fomenting. You name it.

What would I do without the library? Here, because of budget cuts and the anti-intellectualism of the County Commissioners, the downtown library is no longer open on a Sunday. When it was, there was nothing like a grey winter afternoon, spent perusing the stacks. And the payoff a satisfying armload to dump and dip into.

A good book has no ending. – R.D. Cumming