I am a Reading Rainbow child. I am a “Thursdays-were-library-days” kid who treated her borrowed book bounty like the most precious gems ever possessed. I am a got-a-book-report-to-do?-then-go-to-the-library-and-get-your-research-on kid. Pre-internet, hey-day of the encyclopedia and reference section. Dare I say it? I’ll say it: the good ol’ days.
I always read ahead for my age. My dad supported my book devouring by getting me a library card. I don’t remember the exact age, but I do know I wasn’t old enough to sign my own name, and dad held onto it for me. When it was check out time, he would pull it from his wallet and let me hand it to the librarian. Having that little plastic rectangle in my grip, for even a brief moment, was pure magic. The key to a city I wish I could live in full time.
The library served as one of my first understandings of trust. As a kid, the idea of simply walking out with a stack of books seemed too good to be true. Lawless, even. Seven cents a day for every day overdue? Shoot, I probably had a whole-ass quarter in the secret pocket of my Roos shoe. That said, the idea of this entire building/institution trusting me—a child!—was enough to motivate me to get every text back on time.
When I was in 4th/5th grade, my dad moved into a house down the street from the Middletown Library. The house was divided into an upstairs apartment and downstairs apartment—my grandfather let my dad take it on as landlord, so we lived downstairs and rented out the top floor. During the summer, my sister and I walked 1.5 blocks to the library nearly every week while dad worked. I can still conjure up the sound of the automatic doors parting—a ssshhhhhhk and tiny hit of breeze before entering. The smell of the library will always be the smell of the library—the sounds too, because even in the encouraged quiet there is noise. A muted beep of the book scanner or ka-chunk of the Due By stamp, the lowered voice of the information desk worker assisting a patron, maybe the thumpty-thump of a child skipping vigorously while holding the hand of their parent. The glass-walled study rooms were mostly soundproof and stocked with a few vending machines. Before the computers consumed our basic functions, the card catalogue stood almost regal in the center of the main floor. A massive deep brown entity with so many drawers, each displaying a range of numbers on little labels above tiny gold handles. Back then, you learned how to search for your books this way—a method taught in school on those Thursday library days. Technology saw us transitioning to navigation on monitors which were touch screen to start, each option in DOS font. There was something magically tedious about the card catalogue though.
My sister, being three years older, beelined right for the Young Adult section. The YA shelves were in the back, behind the sprawling fiction. The children’s area with board books galore and a tiny circle desk with multi-colored chairs was on the other side of a glass/wall partition. I followed my sister, making sure I kept my distance once we arrived to YA. To be three years apart at that age is to live the thin line of in good graces or annoying, and the library was one place that kept me (generally) off her heels.
Sometimes I went for Christopher Pike(much preferred to R.L. Stine), or I’d check out a book my sister just read, like Paul Zindel’s “The Pigman,” or “My Darling, My Hamburger.”1 Sometimes I would find a book filled with various cheat codes to Nintendo games. This is where I picked up the cheat code for infinity lives in Ikari Warriors2(a game that has no ending as far as I am convinced—we played for hours and days and used the code mercilessly and never made it to an end point). This book taught me where all the warp zone whistles were hiding and how to skip almost directly to level 8 in Super Mario Brothers 3. It’s so funny what stays in your brain.
I worked my way through the shelf of Stephen King books, an author I obsessively read from 5th grade to 9th. I also stumbled upon and loved the Carlotta Carlyle3 series. Carlotta was a six foot tall red head—an ex cop, now private investigator who drove a cab and found trouble all over the place. These books were way above my age but I loved this tough-but-soft sleuth cab driver from Boston.
Sometimes I went in blind, an author’s last name or two bouncing in my head but that’s it. I could say I had a knack for picking the right books knowing nothing about them, but really it comes down to knowing the type of writing I like, and finding that. I’d consider the cover, sure. But I always read the synopsis and first few pages. I was more sensitive to writing style than story. If an author sucked me in with their sentences and the sentences had music to them, I would add it to my pile.
The hunt for what I want is such an exciting part of the library ritual. The scrap paper and pencil stub, the call number scribbled down that would get me what I was looking for. The notification next to each title on the screen: In, Out, Held. It is a hunt I love, the stroll through each row, a descent of alphabet. Here is where I confess: often when I find the general area of what I’m looking for, I intentionally overshoot its home on the shelf, my eyes swinging a pendulum of glances between the numbers after and before it, circling said target for as long as possible to delay that sweet moment of seeing it.
Maybe it is my soft spot for the romantic, this extension of the instant before finding the book I am seeking out. I know that the library is my safe space. It is a place where I am at my most relaxed—I swear I can feel my shoulders lower themselves when I enter, the fist of my spine unfurling. I do not have to be anything except there, searching. It might be the only place I do not walk fast. I can be there an hour and not utter a word. The smell of the books serving its own wild comfort. This is a home to me. The presence of so many words and places and ideas, known and not, to be on a mission for what I love. And yes, it is that important because, even if just for a little while, it brings some relief to the ceaseless tension of living.
I’m intrigued by my instinct to prolong discovery, pulling the anticipation out just short of ridiculous. I suppose I am as hungry for the minutes before the thing just as much as the thing itself. This could be a trip, a show, visiting a friend. A second date after a promising first one—you show up early, drink too much coffee maybe. You could call it…electric waiting. You are eager, but not yet impatient. Even the quiet sliver of time in the early morning before I wake up Naomi—there is a suspension that occurs in the moment before moment, a space created that feels infinite. Is this a sort of meditation? Is this when time in all its illusion takes in a single breath, holds? Anything could happen and is possible—no decision has been made, no true event yet in motion. There is a similar vastness created before, say, the call of an election(as the votes are coming in and being counted, a warbly feeling in the gut—a frequency of hope crackled by the static of dread), or the result of sending out a poem to be published(every time I submit something, I take a minute to savor the endless field of unknown it creates—I am so far from the horizon and cannot be touched by success or failure. I will take my infinity, my anything-could-might-happen-maybe, wherever I can get it. There is no acceptance or declination—only possibility.
Also remember really digging his play “the Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds,”
I still have yet to meet someone other than my sister who played this particular Nintendo game. Via wikipedia: Ikari was originally intended to be an official licensed adaptation of the film Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985), but SNK were initially unable to acquire the rights to the film.
suffice to say my memory isn’t THAT stellar—the name of the detective and the books escaped me, so I googled “red head detective cab driver” and that brought me right to the series by Linda Barnes.