The Library

A conversation last night with Henry led us down a path of nostalgia and back to the places I remember so fondly. I was descriptively walking him down the main street of my hometown, Wauseon, Ohio, and landed on a spot that I'm reluctant to leave, even an evening later when nostalgia is no longer the topic of conversation and the demands of a new week call for my attention.

We were actually talking about grocery stores when I recalled my childhood nirvana, that place that was better than any other. Growing up in a small town in northwestern Ohio in the sixties and seventies meant that small children could do things that mothers would never think of letting them do now. Across the street from the A&P and town post office, just a block from Main Street, was the library--a place so amazing, so quiet, so lovely--so full of books. And when I was still very small, when my mom would shop for groceries at the A&P, she would let me cross the street and visit the library, all by myself.

How could you not love a building in a small town with stained glass like this? And that was just the icing on the cake. Past the card catalog, up the creaky stairway were the children's books, protectively covered in stiff cellophane, some with scotch-taped pages, repaired by a horrified mother who hoped that the librarian wouldn't notice.

Bookshelves just my height contained favorites like Dandelion and Corduroy. And then--as I got a little older--I discovered those neglected books over against the wall, easily overlooked by children who wanted the shallow entertainment of the Bobbsey Twins and Nancy Drew: the plain, burnt-orange colored Childhood of Famous Americans books, with their simple titles in a drab brown type. A girl would definitely have to look beneath the surface to find the treasures inside, and while mom was over at the A&P picking up the bread, meat, milk, and other essentials, I was deciding which famous American heroine I would read about this week: Molly Pitcher, Clara Barton, Helen Keller, or Louisa May Alcott. Sometimes I'd even set my young feminist prejudices aside and read about Abraham Lincoln or Thomas Edison.

And then there was the day that I graduated to the adult section downstairs. In what at the time seemed an enormous room, I made my way through the stacks to my first grown-up book: Jane Eyre. Then high school made me aware of the two front rooms that contained the periodicals, where I was introduced to literary treasures like Teen and Seventeen magazines.

What a marvelous place, this old building that smelled of scotch tape, probably a little dust, ink pens, rubber stamps, and--well, if you've never enjoyed the pleasures of a small-town library, you won't understand--books.

And so I miss my little library, which is still where it was on Elm Street all those years ago, but now with additions, computers, stuffed Arthurs--and no card catalogs. I never would have dreamed back then that I would only visit it here --now a page on the Internet, with only my memories to remind me that it was a real place where a little girl learned to love books and grew up and became an editor, someone who puts books together. And even though I don't think there were any biographies of the childhoods of famous American editors, those books wouldn't have been there if there hadn't been an editor. Even Louisa May Alcott needed an editor, after all.