In the Library

Oh, to write an ode . . .

In the library I felt better, words you could trust and look at till you understood them, they couldn't change half way through a sentence, like people, so it was easier to spot a lie. ~ Jeanette Winterson from Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

I went to the library the other day, driving back roads that take me up a bit of a hill and give me a panoramic view of the Rockies, still topped with snow, and huge puffy clouds in the distance, rain clouds overhead. It was raining only enough to occasionally flick the windshield wipers. 

I needed to get out of the house, and I wanted to be around people, but I didn’t want to interact with people. It’s easy for me to spend too much time alone, and the library is a perfect place to be alone among people, a nice compromise for an introvert.

Do you go to the library? 

I knew I wouldn’t begin to feel like this little town in Colorado was home until I had a library card, and as soon as I had a driver’s license here, I went to the library and signed up. The library was a home with a familiar look and smell, even though this new-ish library looks nothing at all like the library of my childhood, the old building in South San Francisco where I had my first library card. Between that time and this, I’ve had a library card for every place I’ve lived. The library in SSF felt huge to me and the shelves felt tall, but I was only 10 and not yet 5 feet tall, and hardly any taller than that when I graduated to the adult section, where I was afraid they’d take one look at me and tell me to get back to the kids’ section where I belonged.

On this recent visit to my local library, I browsed shelves in the Fiction section, working from a TBR list on my iPhone, and I was so absorbed that I forgot where I was. I was vaguely aware of kids talking and yelling and running (not the libraries of old, where bun-coiffed lady librarians shushed us if we laughed). I was in row M - O when I became aware of where I was, recognizing the familiar clear protective wrapping over the books. 

Libraries have changed a lot over the years, now offering comfortable places to sit, little nooks with high walls, some with little tables, places where a person can crawl into a deep chair and can’t be seen except for his feet:

Libraries are resource centers now, a place you can go to use a computer if you don’t have one at home, a place to rent space to meet with a small group, join a book group, find a community if you are so inclined. And a place where you can sit undisturbed and read a book from the shelf or write in a notebook or stare into space. It’s the “undisturbed” part that appeals to me, and the comfortable places to sit—chairs that are invitations to take your time. 

I grew up as the oldest of seven kids, in a house that was always full of people, and I shared a bedroom with three sisters (the fourth sister was still in a crib in the boys’ bedroom). I didn’t even know the concept of “undisturbed,” but in retrospect, I can see why the library was so appealing back then. I went because of the books, only realizing years later the luxury of being in a place where no siblings would bother me, my mother couldn’t ask me to change the baby’s diaper or set the table for dinner (sometimes I would find my next youngest sister and tell her that mother wanted her to change the diaper or set the table). At home there was always sound and often noise—how could there not be with all those kids? The library was quiet, tip-toe quiet, small-sounds-of-pages-turning quiet, whisper quiet. I could breathe.

Now I live in Quiet and go to the library to have people and sounds around me, and I don’t mind the kids running around—they’re not my responsibility—and I can find quiet nooks upstairs away from the children’s section, maybe in one of those deep chairs that is not so low that I can’t get out of it without looking like a dork.

If I were a poet, I would write an ode to libraries, the ones of old with the shushing librarian and the ones we have now with the noisy kids and special days where dogs get to come in and be read to. I would write an ode to Quiet and list all the kinds of quiet and describe the sound of reading a book and the shush a book makes when you slide it off the shelf. This ode would include whispering—people whispering and pages whispering—and it would include the small rustle a person makes crossing or uncrossing her legs, the sigh a cushion makes when she moves to a more comfortable position.  

Maybe a poem would be able to convey that glow of driving home from the library, an unread book on the passenger seat, the same view of snow-capped mountains, Pike’s Peak in the distance, the same back roads only different now because of the book I will drop into when I get home, but only after steeping a cup of hot tea, finding the perfect snack, plumping the pillows, turning off the phone. Yes, turning off the phone. Making my own Reading Quiet.

Sometimes I wonder if there is one book I’ve read that changed my life in some way, and I can name at least two, but writing about libraries today gives me a different answer: my life has been changed by the existence of libraries. Having a physical building to go to, a palace of books, was a lifesaver for a reader kid whose family couldn’t afford to buy books, and I will forever be grateful for libraries—for what they meant to me then and for how they formed me as the person I am now.  

"Don't let me get sappy on you, but when you get right down to it, every collection of letters is a magic spell, even if it's a moronic proclamation by the Emperor. Words have their impact, girl. . . . I may not know how to fly but I know how to read, and that's almost the same thing. ~ Gregory Maguire, Out of Oz