At home in the stacks
by Stephanie Piper
When I was 6 years old, my life changed forever. I surrendered the role of youngest child, and I got my first library card.
The day my baby brother came home, I sat at the top of the stairs and felt the earth shift under my feet. The diaper delivery truck lumbered to a stop in front of the house. Carmela, the student nurse and part-time nanny, clattered past me with a suitcase. Bottles of formula hissed in a kettle on the stove. My older sister closed the door to the guest room and turned to me, a finger to her lips. Be quiet, she whispered importantly. He’s sleeping in there.
Literary history is full of people who were rescued by books, saved from loneliness and despair by the power of the written word. My own story is less dramatic. It wasn’t despair I was wrestling, just displacement. Still, the creaky Victorian house that served as our town’s library became my haven, and the elderly lady who ran the front desk was my cranky benefactor.
She decided, one spring afternoon, to bend the rules and give me my own card. The official age was seven, but she peered at me over her steel-rimmed glasses and pushed a small manila envelope in my direction. Take care of it, she said sternly. In that instant, I went from reluctant middle child to Responsible Person, and my love affair with book-filled buildings began.
In the five decades of my reading life, libraries have offered me comfort, instruction, escape and gainful employment. My first real job was in a cavernous university library. Hugely pregnant with my first child, I pushed a book trolley through the stacks and paused occasionally to rest in an empty student carrel. I sometimes wonder if my oldest son’s love of reading was born on those quiet afternoons, tucked in a hidden corner between Biography and Philosophy.
We moved away from the university town, and I moved on to big city libraries, bustling and impersonal but still home to me, familiar with their scent of paper and glue and dust. We moved again, and I found the suburban village library before the boxes were unpacked. It was a fixed point on my personal compass, a destination I could trust, a free place to take three small children when the playground lost its charm. Soon they were charting their own journeys, from the picture book room to the I-Can-Read shelves to the heady territory of Encyclopedia Brown and The Great Brain.
When I went to work as a newspaper reporter, the downtown library became my private goldmine. Information gathering in those pre-Internet days meant loading slippery lengths of microfilm into creaky machines and cranking a handle to find the desired page. I spent hours in cramped cubicles, digging for background on my stories and filling notebooks with the scrawled details of early Dogwood Festivals and Dulin Gallery galas.
Now my favorite lunch hour is a trip to the little flat-roofed library near my office. I scan the new fiction, then settle on an outdoor bench with a sandwich and a much-read Barbara Pym or Rumer Godden novel for company. The place bears no resemblance to a certain Victorian house on Bedford Road in Pleasantville, New York, but déj� vu engulfs me. I’ve got my books. I’ve got my card. I’m where I belong.
March 25, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 13
© 2004 Metro Pulse
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