Bookin' it

I did something tonight that I haven't done in years. I went to the library to check out a big ole pile of new books. Going to the library is an activity that is part and parcel of the foundation of my childhood. My first library memory was walking for what seemed like hours to get to the Nicholson Memorial Library on the town square of Garland, Texas. I can remember how cool the tiles felt on my bare feet, after pounding the hot pavement. And the smell of that place is still inside my head. It was an old building and the books were old and, even at five, I could feel the sense of history and life that was contained there. We moved away when I was nine. I came back years later just to see it again and was heartbroken to find that it had been torn down.

We moved around quite a bit during my childhood and, everywhere we went, we always staked out the library. I've read from the Chicago library and the library in Falls Church, Virginia and bookmobiles in a variety of locations. (You want to talk about a memorable place! Stepping up into that dim, cool book-smelling cave out of a hot, bright parking lot was like leaving the real world for a little while to explore a parallel universe.) Our family hunted out second hand book stores and bought huge boxes of books at garage sales. But we always had library books checked out and due back in 2 weeks. (The greatest annoyance of my childhood, aside from the fact that I was not allowed to eat all the corn on the cob I wanted, was that there was a limit to the number of books you could check out of the children's department.)

When I grew up, I fell in love with a fellow reader. Although his tastes are wildly different from mine, we were in total agreement that having your own books was the way to go. We (mostly me, actually) developed the attitude early on in our marriage that a book worth reading was book worth owing. At one point we were member of 3 book clubs. Hardly a week went by without the delivery of a box of new books. And we kept them all. Even moving half way across the country--twice--didn't cause us to pare down our collection.

The one mile move from our house to our daughter's house, though, was a different story. They didn't have the room (or the inclination) to absorb the hundreds of books that we had acquired over the years. And we had to face the fact that we hadn't read some of our treasures in more than several decades, and it wasn't reasonable to keep them. So we sold and donated our way down to the ones we really loved and couldn't do without. And for the first time in over thirty years, I've gone six months without buying any books. I've had plenty to read here, but it's been an unusual period of adjustment to stop buying a book just because I wanted to read it.

I have given myself some new reading goals in my 101 list, so going to the library is once again the thing to do. As I wandered around the rows of books tonight, I was amazed by a number of things. One was how many of the books I had already read and another was how many books I hadn't. The biography section seemed surprisingly small and the range of subjects was almost funny. Lots of books about John Wayne and Shakespeare and Hitler. Some people I'd never heard of, some people that I'd heard of that didn't seem to warrant a mention. The whole experience felt new and old, all at the same time. I came home with a novel by Chaim Potok that I read years ago. I didn't really get it then, but I think I might understand it a little better now. I brought home a biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning because I remember being so enchanted by The Barretts of Wimpole Street when I was in 7th grade English class. Three novellas by one of my favorite authors. A biography of C.S. Lewis because my grandchildren are currently enthralled by the Chronicles of Narnia. I haven't had such a huge stack of reading material since I was a little girl.

It's all due back in two weeks. And then I can check out another big pile, as many as I want.