Libraries

It is a September Saturday morning, and my daughter has resumed her weekend dance class – and I, once again, have the happy duty of being her transportation. Our routine, over the two years she’s been in this class, has been for me to pick her up and drive her to class, chatting and singing and joking as we go, then stealing away to the nearby Jeffersonville Public Library with laptop and a few reference books in my backpack for an hour of journalistic solitude. 

Today, I noticed for the first time that there are administrative rooms here, free for public use, a bit quieter than the open main floor. I inquired, and was cheerfully escorted to one of these rooms, where now I sit, with my work waiting patiently in my backpack. 

But I’m swelling with gratitude right now for this happy feature of our modern world, the Library - and feel I should say a few words. 

My life is a progression of such buildings, and I can reconstruct who I was and how I became who I am from that progression. 

Let’s begin in the Garden Springs Elementary School library, where I met Alfred Hitchcock’s Three Investigators, and the concept of the short story collection. It was here I picked up the notion that thinking could be the true action in an adventure story. 

Then there was the East Point Public Library in Georgia, where I read Andy Buckram’s Tin Men, the first science fiction I encountered, a book that assured me that young minds were capable of invention – and which I took to my grandparents’ farm, where my grandfather and I began constructing a robot from tin cans. 

Then came the East Union Elementary library, where I befriended Encyclopedia Brown – learning that girls were as smart as (and often tougher than) boys – and discovered real science fiction, in the form of Revolt on Alpha C by Robert Silverberg and The Runaway Robot by Lester del Rey. From these readings sprang my first thoughts of what human society might someday become, and how technology will increasingly reflect our humanity. 

The best was yet to come. Junior high school beckoned, and I attended Darlington, an old Hoosiers-style pile of faded brick three stories tall (with dingy basement), high ceilings, thick oak banisters and a gym built in the Twenties – with a musty-sweet library on the third floor, where Study Hall took place: my personal heaven. 

My friends and I would zip through our homework, raise our hands, and be granted grazing rights in the stacks - where I found Asimov’s I, Robot and Heinlein’s Space Cadet and Bradbury’s A Medicine for Melancholy and Something Wicked This Way Comes – manna from heaven, all of it! - and decided to become a writer. 

It was a heartbreak, but only a brief one, when I graduated to North Montgomery High, an ultra-modern building that could not have been more different – with a library that hosted Clarke’s The Nine Billion Names of God and Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles and a Hugo Winners collection that featured Tom Godwin’s gut-wrenching “The Cold Equations” (to which I wrote a reply story, decades later). 

All of that culminated at the nearby Crawfordsville Public Library, where I found The Illustrated Man and Asimov’s Buy Jupiter and the novel version of 2001: A Space Odyssey – a paperback I failed to return, and upon which there must now be a $5,000 fine, these 42 years later. 

In my freelance months, when I have no office to go to, I dislike working at home. Being surrounded by my own books is a comfort, to be sure, but it’s terribly lonely. I have grown accustomed to sauntering up the road to the New Albany Public Library, where I can write in peace but still be around the smiles and warmth and courtesies of other human beings – as I am this moment. 

Needless to say, all of my children have subsequently had deep indoctrinations into the joys of libraries. 

Libraries made me who I am. 

Zeus willing, I will die in one.