Late last July, when the Cicadas had overtaken the sun-baked airwaves and the swimming pool was the temperature of bathwater, I pulled a tote bag from the closet and directed my daughter, Alison, into the car.
“We’re going to get snow cones?” she asked, bouncing on her toes with excitement.
“No, we are not going to get snow cones,” I tried to sound cheerful and playfully mysterious, without adding that I had spent the equivalent of two birthday budgets on smoothies, custard and snow cones since summer began and was beginning to feel fleeced. I questioned my parental discernment more than a few times as we stood in a line that wrapped around the miniscule Sno Cone Shak hut while we waited to pay $1.75 for ice and sugar water.
“It’s hot outside,” Alison said in a not-so-subtle attempt to steer me toward the Shak.
“Yes it is, and so we are going to a place where it’s nice and cool.” I kept the mysterious edge to my voice.
“Oooh, that sounds nice.”
She was eight, and most easily pleased. I counted this in my daily list of blessings, since I knew that in a few years this would all come to a screeching halt as she crashed into adolescence. It would take more than snow cones and air-conditioning to make her day. Summer would be a long concession of driving her to the water park, the miniature golf course, the indoor rock-climbing wall, the newly released and overly hyped movie. She would whine that there was nothing to do in our boring house as she sat in a room filled with electronic gadgets, and she would long to be where her friends were gathered because they had undoubtedly found the place where fun exists. I remembered these days well, and was glad that I was in a respite between them. The teenagers now had cars, a little money in their pockets and the good sense not to whine about boredom.
“Where is this nice place with air-conditioning?” she asked as we drove past the Snow Cone Shak. I could see her head craning to look at the line of fortunate children. “It’s… the library!” I said with dramatic pause and much enthusiasm.
Silence.
“Doesn’t that sound fun?” I held up the tote bag and glanced at her in the rear view mirror. “See, I brought a big bag so we can carry all our books home.”
She caught me looking at her and gave a frail smile. “It will be nice and cool inside,” she said, ever the optimist.
I am a book junkie. Since childhood, I have known the pure pleasure of wrapping myself inside inked pages and allowing them to carry me away, although I am unsure where this came from. When I was growing up, the small number of books my parents owned were mostly stored in the end tables in our living room, which had doors on them so you could never actually see the books. My parents mostly read the newspaper and a few magazines, probably because they couldn’t remember that they had books stored in the end tables.
As an act of adult rebellion, I have books in prominent locations everywhere in my house. There are books in the floor-to-ceiling shelves in my office, in the den wine cabinet, on the kitchen countertop, in the purchased library unit my husband assembled on a snowy January afternoon. For years, I have been proud to announce that our bookshelves are full to overflowing and have stated with profundity: “Books are like friends, you can never have too many.” Lately, however, I had begun to wonder.
Several weeks before the library trip, I took a quick inventory of my books during a frantic and tardy Spring-cleaning and realized that the overflow of books stacked on top of my neatly lined rows called for a purging. In the process of deciding which books to store in the plastic bins at my feet, I realized an entire shelf was unread. I counted 22 books, the covers of which had never been cracked. It was a sad reality followed by one that was startling: I had no desire to read these books. They covered a wide expanse - a highly acclaimed bestselling novel, a volume on Irish history, a memoir about law school, the biography of the Oxford English dictionary. I recalled purchasing each book and being filled with the anticipation of reading it, but the shelves had been overflowing even then and the newly purchased books were forced to the back of the reading list queue. Now, they were simply décor, taking up space and destined for the bin, which begged the question of whether I would place my friends in a plastic storage bin if they no longer interested me.
Much like my tally of how much money I had spent on frozen summer treats, I had conducted a quick comparative cost analysis and determined that we could have outfitted our three children in one year of trendy school clothes for the price of the unread books on my shelves. I felt a tinge of guilt, which was quickly followed by a vow to chip away at the reading queue before purchasing any more books. It was an addict’s promise and I knew it.
It had been months since Alison and I had stepped foot in the library – twelve to be exact. Our treks had become cyclical and predictable, coinciding with the droning wind-down of summer. Last year, we started the summer reading program three weeks before it was over. “Better read quick,” the teenage volunteer who checked us out said with a lilt of hopelessness in her voice. We left for vacation without returning the armload of books and after we had been home for a few days, I dumped them in the drive-thru book drop like a fugitive, sped away from the library and hadn’t been back.
The cool air hit us as soon as we walked through the doors of the Hardesty Regional Library. Alison immediately trotted to the children’s section and I followed with my tote bag, feeling a bit smug about providing my child with such rich literary exposure. The shelves were low, long and full. “Look at all these books Alison,” I said. “You can choose ten.”
She turned to look at me slowly and opened her mouth with a theatrical look of shock.
“Ten?” she shrieked and I put a finger to my lips.
“We have to be quiet in the library.”
“Okay,” she said, “but are you really going to buy me ten books?”
Instinctively, I looked around to make sure that no one had heard her question. The few mothers standing nearby were absorbed in their own children, who had undoubtedly been better educated about public library patronage. In one moment, my deprived child had launched a question that rightly shattered my parental pride.
“Honey, this is the library. The books are free.”
“Free?” she shrieked.
“We get to borrow them,” I said with my finger in front of my lips.
“Borrow?”
“We’ll bring them back when we’re finished reading them.”
She raised her eyebrows and began to nod slowly. “Oh yeah, I remember how it works.”
I sat on a nearby bench with the tote bag at my feet, holding it open. Perhaps, I thought hopefully, she had been toying with me. Had she really forgotten the library? Had the ability to collect a bulging bag of books and take them home without exchanging money slipped her mind? Somewhere near the Eric Carle collection, Alison struck up a jaunty conversation with another little girl so I decided to leave the tote bag and saunter to the tall shelves.
“I’m going to go look around,” I said, and she nodded absently as the other girl babbled on. I resisted the urge to stick around, just to make sure they didn’t compare notes on library visits. “Oh, my mom hardly ever brings me to the library,” I could imagine Alison saying with a pout in her voice. “She gets her books from a box that the guy in the brown shirt leaves on the front porch. Mom always says that you can’t have too many books.”
Too many books.
As I stood looking up at the rows of hardbound biographies and thought about the library card in my wallet, I decided it was time to become a responsible book junkie. I pulled two biographies from the shelf, wandered to the fiction area where I found a thick bestseller, and then plucked a collection of essays from the volumes of non-fiction. Alison was lugging a full tote bag when we met under the arch of zoo animals at the children’s area entrance.
“You’re borrowing books too?” She asked, pointing to my armload.
“I am.”
That’s good,” she said with a sly smile, “because they’re free you know.”
My reunion with the public library came at the right time. Eight weeks later we lost a large chunk of our financial nest egg as the economy began a slow swan dive. My husband had left his lucrative law practice to take a job as a university dean, and our modest paychecks were still surprising us each month.
I have begun a slow ridding of the things in my life that are mostly unnecessary: faddish clothing, magazine subscriptions, crafts for projects I will never finish…and a few books. The man in the brown shirt no longer brings me mail order books, but each week I pull out the tote bag and drive to the library to indulge in guilt-free consumption. With one renewal, I am able to keep the books for as long as a month, and I can go online and request a book be couriered from a distant branch if it is unavailable at mine. These perks seem far too generous for the small sum of an occasional overdue fine.
The floor-to-ceiling bookshelves in my office library are still full, and they continue to give me warmth when I sit between them at my desk. I am hemmed in by old friends, and I suppose that there will be a few times when new friends are slipped into the shelves. I won’t be able to resist the scent of fresh ink and the smooth pages that have no creased corners. There will be books that I will to want to keep me company for the long haul. But my library tote hangs by the door, ready for our weekly fill at the place where the books are free. And maybe, just for old times sake, I’ll stop on the way home for some ice and sugar water.
