every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that appreciates
the library
do you remember discovering the library? the public library, not the school library. books everywhere! more books than you could read in a week, a month, a year! books you might never want to read, books you might never slog through, but books and books and books you might very well read and even re-read, reference books you'd never imagined, enough story books to fill every night of your life! for me it happened in Clovis, New Mexico, after my parents collected their kids from two places in Texas and dumped us in a house I can't remember except that it had wooden floors and paper walls inside, and a back yard big enough that you could start to run. the fence had a gate I could open, which let me into the alley down which I could get to a major street, and up which I could get into a neighborhood that didn't welcome kids like me. but if I went out the front door of the house, right across the street was a building that I presumed was a house like ours, except it was tucked away at the back end of grounds with trees and grass and paths and benches. in the front of those grounds was a big structure like a stucco fort. quiet questioning of people I found on the benches revealed that the big structure was the county courthouse, which seemed to have everything in it, an office for the sheriff, part of the county jail, offices and offices for important people who did things I couldn't understand, several county courtrooms, rooms and rooms and rooms for lawyers to do secret things with people, even the people in charge of collecting the garbage had an office there. and the little house-like building? oh, that was the county library. yes, the county library was kind of an outhouse for the county courthouse. I didn't know what a library was, and was a nosy kid, so I went in. no one kicked me out. OMG! books everywhere! it even had niches where a person could sit out of other people's way with books on either side of the chair! shelves broke the main rooms into narrow strips with books on both sides of them. OMG! OMG! it had a room with books for children! I went in scornful, expecting run-dick-run books, and sure enough it had a dozen or so of those and maybe a hundred Golden Books, but it must have had at least a thousand books with no pictures or almost no pictures. books about cowboys, books about pirates, books about soldiers, books about detectives, books about dogs, books about cats for heaven's sake! and they would let me just sit and read! one day a librarian let me in on another secret. I could get a library card! then I could borrow books, take them home, read them, and return them. I could check out six books at a time! well, you can tell: the library was a miracle, and I had access to it! sixty-some years later, I still think the library is a miracle! and I still have access to it. (not the one in Clovis, but any of the ones in Los Angeles.)
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