So today’s Booking Through Thursday question made me smile:
I saw that National Library week is coming up in April, and that led to some questions. How often do you use your public library and how do you use it? Has the coffeehouse/bookstore replaced the library? Did you go to the library as a child? Do you have any particular memories of the library? Do you like sleek, modern, active libraries or the older, darker, quiet, cozy libraries?
Oh, how often I use my public library. I use my public library to cheer myself up whenever I am depressed. The main branch of our public library is the library I have been going to since I was a little, little girl. These days I work near a different branch, which is nice and saves me gas money, but I don’t feel the same way about it. The drive from my parents’ house to the main branch of the library is my favorite drive of any in town – especially for those few weeks in March when the azaleas have blossomed most brilliantly.
My favorite memory of the library is how some weekends when we were in middle school (and maybe into high school? I can’t remember), my sister and I and two or three of our geekier friends used to have what we called “library days” – we would all pack bag lunches and spend a Saturday at the library. There was a particular place in the very, very back of the children’s section, where nobody ever went, and that was our base of operations for the day. We’d put four or five cushioned benches together between the shelves and lie on them reading the massive piles of books we had collected. It was perfect, because we liked hanging out together, and we loved being around all the books, and at the same time we suspected we weren’t meant to have the benches or be munching on carrots in the back of the children’s section, so it felt like we were getting away with something.
I’m not sure if technology advanced and they spotted us on closed circuit cameras, or if we started to look shady, but the library people stopped letting us hang out back there. I would actually still really enjoy doing a library day, but every participant in them now lives in a different city; and anyway we are far too old. Which I guess is just what happens when you grow up.