Book Air

You’re the you you are now, stunned that you are old enough to feel this way, remember so far back, and the you you were then, totally innocent of what and who you will one day become. I remember speakers at various functions who would stand at a mic and tell us all in that hot old gymnasium in small town Illinois, not to store too much in what we thought we’d one day become, because life would accidentally blow all our plans. “I never thought I’d be a librarian [insert profession, they all said it], but life is like that.” It was the opposite of inspirational. It also wasn’t really true. Even at fifteen I was pretty sure it wasn’t true, that no one could say such a thing would be true for the couple hundred or so of us in the room. But what I do think is true, and was maybe part of what those uninspirational speakers were getting it, is that every life reaches this point of stunned wisdom wherein the mind is capable of holding several time periods at once. You can walk around in your own past and feel it like electricity on your skin—not your old, current skin, but your young, unblemished, brand new skin, sweaty and fresh at the ballpark in June, dumping pixie sticks onto your tongue, waving away mosquitos or ducking under branches in the dark woods next to Washington park, following fireflies further and further from your own backyard. Both times exist. You are quite literally  in two places at the same time. Make no mistake: this is the Twilight Zone, the fourth dimension, the stuff of science fiction. It gets even weirder if the memories involve places that no longer exist. A house that got razed, or a park that got developed, because even as you’re stepping around these old places with your ghost, the current you is very aware that you can never really go back. You are back, reliving it, but you can’t be because it isn’t there any more. Note that you don’t say to yourself, Self,  you can’t go back because time doesn’t work that way; or, Self, all that was so long ago. You say, no, this isn’t possible, because the house has been torn down, or he has died, or that tree was removed not long after we moved….which makes no logical sense, but as I said we’ve entered the realm where logic is not the organizing principle.

I’m thinking of the Carnegie library in Robinson, Illinois (that’s it in the photo above). It appalls me that I sometimes hear my children, even my daughter who read at an early age, resist going to the library. She even says—gasp—I hate the library. I have to sit with myself a long time after hearing this. I take it personally. I trudge, deflated, to the bedroom to sulk. I silently spout, like I bet John McEnroe would if his kid hated tennis, How can I be the parent of a creature who hates the library??!! This goes on until I can talk myself back, reasoning calmly that I am not an athlete parent and don’t want to be; they are their own people; you cannot make them love what you love; you must respect what they love or at least be happy they love it. And on we go.

But lately, perhaps now because it’s summer, I have taken the self-talk a step further by examining the library experience. Our library is gorgeous. It was funded by the town, by a majority vote on a mill levy, brand new, modern, windows all around with big, awesome electronic blinds that come down to shield patrons from the sun. It ‘s open, too; nonfiction upstairs looks down on fiction and periodicals downstairs. Even though I sometimes curse the limitations of the collection (the place is small) and I can get really down about the lack of literary periodicals, I do like it. But I don’t feel about it the way I felt when I was eight and we went to the Robinson Public Library on the corner near our church. It was built in 1906; I don’t remember the street names, and I certainly don’t know if it still stands. But me and my ghost wandered around there recently, entering through a side door which was hidden by ivy—I don’t think I mentioned that the building was three stories and covered in ivy—down the narrow stairs, dark and somehow  secret, to  the kids’ collection. Past the honey colored card catalog that stood up on legs so you didn’t have to stoop to open any of drawers, unless you were really tall. And into the stacks. I didn’t call them that at the time. It was evening, there was a storm brewing and while we were down there I heard it begin to rain, upping the magic factor. It was summer; the place was cool and dark and you could feel that ivy surrounding the building, protecting it, holding it in its heavy, misty breath. But it’s the smell that has stayed with me. I think it changed my life. Book air. This was a term I heard a decade later, after we moved to Tennessee. Mike Morgan said it on a senior English field trip to the UT library in Knoxville—also old and quiet—long after we’d left Illinois, after, even, that Carnegie library was closed and a modern, open  library was built to replace it. No magic to the place, as there is no magic to ours. In fact, ours is absolutely overrun, every day, by mothers and infants and whining toddlers having snacks at the tables in the foyer outside the coffee shop, a modern amenity now apparently required for all dispensers of books—store or library. It’s as if we need the jolt of caffeine to brace ourselves for the experience. We kind of do.

There’s Story Time and Books and Babies and Read-to-a-Dog and group singing and magic shows and any number of events to keep the mothers and the very young entertained. When my children were very young, I sat down and thanked god for the library every day of the week. But now that they are older and we are ready to actually, well, read, I rather understand why an eight-year-old might not see the library as the sort of place to do just that. She might not feel the fingers of the authors in her hair or the breath of the people who for fifty years have sought refuge in these patient books. The place  is only in its third year. There isn’t any ivy anywhere in this state and, frankly, it doesn’t get hot enough to want to hole up in the basement.

The world is different. This is not news. Libraries have changed. Even reading has changed. And of course, She’s not Me. I guess the real takeaway here is this: my eight-year-old self is still down there, waiting out the storm in that quiet, consolatory, hushed, basement full of books she cannot wait to get her hot little hands on.