100,000 BTUS and Endless Possibilities
A lot of writers can claim to have learned their love of reading from libraries. My claim is unique only in what brought me to the library in the first place: air conditioning. I grew up in Lake Forest, IL, a city of 20,000 people 30 miles north of Chicago, on the shore of Lake Michigan. We lived in a house built in 1927 (a year that would end up being important to me later, as it’s the year in which our novel is set). The house--I knew this even as a child--was a gracious house, with arched doorways that beckoned you into rooms with pleasing proportions. It was the kind of house you were glad to come home to after school. There was only one time, in fact, when the house was inhospitable--when the freaky August heat waves would squat motionless over the town, banishing any lake breezes; you see, our old house didn’t have air conditioning. What was I to do at 10, 11, 12, too young for a summer job, too young to drive someplace cooler?
I walked to the Lake Forest library.
We lived on Deerpath Avenue, just five houses east. I’d be sweating by the time I climbed the hill, and I’d push the heavy door open and stand in the vestibule and let the chilled air frisk me, raise goose pimples on my forearms. I’d inhale the library smell, paper and dust and lemon wax. Then I turned right and went down the steps to the children’s library, with its kid-height water-fountain and kid-height chairs and bathroom one could unlock with a key attached to a giant piece of wood so that it wouldn’t get lost.
As I grew older I more often didn’t take that right turn, instead walking straight ahead over the marble tile, past the displays with the librarian’s recommended books, past the periodical room over to the right with its leather club chairs, past the circulation desk, and headed into the fiction stacks. No one guided me. No “required reading” list forced my hand to one book or another, not even a kind recommendation from a friend or book group. I wandered and all the books were equally unknown to me, all authors equally anonymous, because I hadn’t heard anyone talk about them, not yet at least. I ghosted through the aisles, and then I’d stop--maybe a title caught my eye, or I liked the design--slide a book out (careful not to hook the spine) and read a page. If I liked it, it would go onto the stack, and when my book bag couldn’t hold anymore I would lug it home to my simmering house.
Imagine being thirteen and stumbling upon The Optimist’s Daughter, by Eudora Welty, merely because the title in a chubby purple font was appealing. Imagine picking up a book called Mrs. Dalloway, merely because you liked the last name “Woolf.”
Thank you, Library.
I’m sure kids growing up today love their Kindles and Nooks, and I understand the appeal (well, that’s a lie. I don’t get it. But that’s another story). Let them have their internet browsing; let me be grateful for the kind I had, the serendipity of wandering and reading a paragraph or a page, that physical pleasure too of hefting the book, fingering the deckle edges, the slightly mildewed smell some of them had, the liver-spotted pages, occasionally even marginalia which of course made the book even better, as I read someone reading my book. That essential solitary education, as much as anything, has made me a writer.
And so I say again, Thank you, Library.
My mother has moved from that grand old house into a smaller house one town over. I visit her, and when I do, I like to pop in the library. It’s changed--improved, in fact--the wooden card catalogue with the clever pleasurable tiny drawers made obsolete by computers, and other necessary and positive renovations. The librarians no longer recognize me. Why should they, it’s not “my” library anymore. But sometimes, when I press open the door, and the chill ripples goosebumps on my forearm, and I smell the library smell, I am thirteen again, a heavy book bag on my shoulder of my already-reads, and ahead of me, endless unknowable possibilities for pleasure.
By Beth Ann Fennelly
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