‘L’ is for Libraries
In the 1960’s, Gram arrived at our house every weekday morning in her pea-green Ford Galaxy. We thought its tail fins were embarrassingly outdated. Gram was our housekeeper/nanny, not our biological grandmother, but she loved us as though we were her own.
On summer Wednesdays, we kids would pile into the backseat of Gram’s Ford to go into town for story hour at the library. A ride in the backseat of Gram’s Ford was its own adventure. So many miles had passed under the body of that old car that the floorboard had rusted away. Where dirt floor mats should have been, a montage of asphalt and gravel flew past as we rumbled down the road.
Mom had instructed us to stay on the seat in Gram’s car, for fear of losing a child through the hole. That didn’t stop us from crawling onto the floor to push pea-sized gravel that had flown up through the hole, back out in an amazing disappearing act as the asphalt whizzed by.
When the dusty ride ended, Gram parked the Ford in front of the huge pane-glass window of our small-town library. It took every ounce of strength I had to push the carved wooden door of the library open. As the loose window in the door rattled its resistance to opening, the luxurious, beckoning fragrance of musty pages filled our nostrils.
“Well, Hello kids!” the librarian sang out. It was a one-room library with our Aunt Marie as librarian; there were no other patrons to ‘shoosh’ her greeting. The single north-facing window and tall ceiling kept the room a cool and inviting summer escape. We carried our books to be returned across the cool linoleum floor to Aunt Marie’s desk at the back of the room.
After exchanging ‘how have you beens,’ we began our serious search in the books for young readers on the low shelves beside the window. Occasionally a few other children would also come to the library for story hour, but most often we were Aunt Marie’s only ‘wigglers.’ We laid our careful selections on the low oak table circled by tiny oak chairs in front of the window.
Aunt Marie would come over to the little table and we’d take our seats. As we scooted our chairs around a bit to get into proper position for listening, Aunt Marie settled into the big oak chair and took a book from our selections. She was always careful to choose a book from a different patron’s pile each week so as not to show favorites. Once our little bottoms were all in the right spot for listening, she began her animated oration.
Our favorite story was “The Blueberry Pie Elf,” a selection my sister brought to the table again and again. Such a clever little elf he was, with such an innocent plea for “more blueberry pie, please.”
As the years went by, our bottoms and interests outgrew the miniature reading circle. Our interests took us around the room in progressive levels of reading. We moved from the Blueberry Pie Elf through the Little House series through the Trixie Beldon mysteries and into teen adventures. We took our books with us to our favorite summer hideouts (tree forts and the like) to enter into the world of “Little Women,” “Gone with the Wind,” and Leon Uric epics.
In my mid-teens, Aunt Marie helped me to special order “Roots.” I devoured it at record speed. Just as Chicken George was about to win his freedom in a gamble at the cockfight, it was time for me to get ready to go to work. My summer job earnings were my college tuition, my ticket to the future. But I couldn’t put the book down. The clock kept ticking. I skipped words, flew through sentences and gobbled paragraphs to discover George’s future without losing mine.
In those pages from the library I traveled on the ocean with Kunta Kinte, across the prairie with Laura Ingalls, along the Underground Railroad with Harriet Tubman and into all the possibilities of my future. Thank you Gram, for making library visits a priority. Thank you Aunt Marie, for making reading exciting. Thank you taxpayers, for supporting libraries and allowing minds to travel into possibilities.
