Close to Home: Books

It’s National Library Week (April 19-25) for 2020. My county’s library system is closed for visitors, but, thankfully, e-book borrowing is still available. I’m not the only one who is a fervent customer these days. But then, I grew up on books…

Every Saturday when I was little, my mother would scoop us into the car and we’d drive to the library. And then we’d drive to another library. Sometimes, we’d drive to a third library. You see, each library had a 14-item limit on checking out books. My mother would blow through that in way less than a week, hence the multiple libraries. I grew up thinking that everyone went to a lot of libraries every Saturday.

I remember wandering through the children’s books, proudly making my own reading pile. And I remember the day I found a book in the young adult section and put it on my pile. When I tried to check it out, the librarian refused, saying it was too advanced for me. It had never occurred to me that I couldn’t check out any book in the library.

My mother saw my confused face as I walked away with my smaller pile of books. She asked me what was wrong. When I said the librarian wouldn’t let me have a book I wanted, my mother got an odd look on her face. She put a hand on my shoulder, literally turned me around, and we marched back up to the checkout desk. My mother didn’t even ask to see the book I had wanted. She simply informed the librarian that I had her permission to check out whatever book I wanted to read. As I recall, the librarian started to quote a rule about age-appropriate reading. My mother simply repeated that I had her permission to read whatever I wanted. The librarian backed down and my mother triumphantly added that book to my pile.

When I was older, my mother went back to college. She earned an A.A. then a B.A. in English and a Master’s in Library Science. The housewife that had dropped out of UCLA in 1950 after her freshman year to get married finally realized her lifelong dream of being a librarian. Over the course of her career, she worked in public libraries all over Southern California. She was a reference librarian, a children’s librarian, and a general circulation librarian. When she retired, her friends threw her a big party and gave her a little red book cart for the tiny library at the retirement village where she and my dad lived.

Her whole life had revolved around books. When she died, she left behind her sanctuary, six tall oak bookcases stuffed three rows deep with paperback books. In the days after the funeral, each of the kids took whatever books we wanted, but that still left about five and a half bookcases of worn but well-loved books. They didn’t have any financial value, though, and the local library was already overwhelmed with donations. As I left to fly home, I apologetically told my dad that I really didn’t know what to do about all those books.

A few weeks later, my brother called, asking me if I knew what Dad was doing with Mom’s books. I said I had no idea. And that’s when he told told me this story.

He had gone to visit Dad, who met him downstairs in the lobby. On their way to his apartment, Dad snagged a shopping cart from the storage area and took it up to his fourth-floor apartment. As they talked, Dad rolled the cart into the bedroom and slowly started stacking paperbacks into the cart. My brother watched him clear a shelf in the bookcase as they continued their conversation.

When the shopping cart was full, Dad wheeled it back down the hallway and into the elevator. He got out on the first floor and slowly pushed it down the corridor to an unmarked door. He propped that door open and then, one by one, threw each of the books into the huge recycling bin. When the cart was empty, he closed the door and returned the cart to the front desk. When my brother asked, Dad said he’d being doing this for a while.

Some people bring flowers to a grave. Others donate to a charity in memory of someone. One old man brought paperback books to a dumpster every day, slowly letting go of his late wife and facing how to live the rest of his life without her.

I loved wandering around the bookshelves, scanning the spines until something happened to catch my eye. Those visits were dreamy, frictionless interludes that promised I would leave richer than I arrived.

Susan Orlean (The Library Book)