You walk in the door of the library. To your left is colored glass (orange, blue, green, and yellow) and places to drop off books. Behind the glass is the room where books are taken when they are returned. To your right are administrative offices with shaded windows, and also the small, fake Christmas tree with all of the ornaments decorated by the staff. You walk further left, and find shelves of movies, adolescent books and books in large print. The carpet is navy, with small pieces of color in it, and the light comes more from electric bulbs than it does from the sun, though there are several windows. There is an elevator, and rows of computers with their plastic carapaces sitting on lacquered tables.
Upstairs are the children’s books, with different areas for different reading levels. You take the stairs up, because it is only one flight, and the stairs are dark but there is a quilt on the wall depicting books from your childhood. You wave to the over-friendly librarian who sits behind the desk, and press on, anxious to escape her bright gaze.
You turn and descend the stairs, walking further forward, into the belly of the beast. Along the right wall there are small shelves with newly published books sitting in neat rows. There are tables, and to the left a librarian or two sits at the reference desk, waiting to anticipate your questions. Further in there are stacks of biographies, novels, handbooks for computers, fading paper covers that house romance or science fiction.
You approach the woman at the circulation desk, holding two novels by a little-known author. She barely manages a smile as she holds the barcodes under the red line of light. You wait for the beep. The librarian tells you without much enthusiasm when your books are due, and to have a nice day! You return home and begin reading.
This is my library, and it is where I grew up. This autumn it was renovated. They started getting rid of books while I was still working there over the summer. I remember they had taken a poll about what people looked for in a library. No one voted for well-loved books with coffee stains that smelled like vanilla and old paper. “Weeding,” they called it, as if these cloth-bound classics and yellowed paperbacks were just as unwanted as dandelions in a suburban yard. They had to make room for newer books, they said. If I could, I would have taken all of those old books home, given them a spot on my already-overflowing bookshelf.
I felt the loss of them very keenly. I had spent so much of my childhood in that library, and the books were as much a part of me as the skinned knees I got every summer and the off-key singing of Disney songs and the macaroni and cheese I ate for lunch. I remember coming home with armfuls of Boxcar Children books. I was so proud when I finished an entire story in just one day. Now it felt as if a part of my own history was gone, thrown away like so much rubbish.
Near the end of the summer I came into work and was surprised to find everything in a different place than where I left it. It was my responsibility to re-shelve the books that people had returned, and it took me a few weeks to get back into the rhythm of things. What had once been an administrative office was now the new books section. (They got what they wanted, a whole room for shiny new dust jackets with green stickers proclaiming NEW in bold letters.)
Sometimes there were loud noises coming from the back, where the workers were performing their renovations. They were pounding on the ceiling, and once a sharp piece of metal almost fell on my head. The area which had once housed nonfiction books was hidden from library patrons by semi-transparent tarps hanging from the ceiling like ghosts or the veiling of a crime scene. The nonfiction was now scattered throughout the reference area, where there had once been tables, and the fiction was confined to small shelves in the back. It was a riot of wood and paper where once had been orderly shelves with aisles to walk through and a familiar scent of dust and dimmed sunlight.
I learned my way around soon enough. The adolescent literature had been moved to where the reference desk once was. Large print and movies were in the space in front of the circulation desk, to the left when you walked through the door. There was a periodicals room, separated from the rest of the library by glass walls. The tables where I had once sat with a stack of books higher than my knees were gone, replaced by chaos of shelves. The staff break room where I had long conversations with my coworker and good friend over lunch had been moved to another spot. The relocation was a poke in a bruise.
No one else seemed upset about the change. Maybe they were trying to stay positive. I remember my boss, a tiny woman who is fierce but incredibly kind, acting so cheerful about the renovation. Maybe she was actually excited. I suppose from an administrative standpoint getting a makeover would bring more people to the library. Maybe she was just trying to keep spirits up.
The library of my childhood has changed, but it is not gone. The bare bones of it are still there, the rafters and the plaster and the concrete foundation. It is still the same building, the same lovely old woman who sheltered me in my childhood afternoons. I still come back from the library arms laden with books, though my reading tastes have evolved a bit at this point from the Boxcar Children books of my elementary school years. I still sometimes spend a good amount of time sitting among the stacks, wandering and looking for books that catch my eye, and then reading them, while my mother tutors children in reading and math in the small study spaces. This library is still my home.
