I went to my local library in Scarborough last week, which was probably the first time I’d been in a local library since I was in college. I needed some books for the flights back and forth to Seattle for the weekend, knowing that I’d be at risk of getting delayed somewhere, so I borrowed my dad’s library card and browsed for a bit.
I spent most of my childhood, it seemed, in the Thomas Memorial Library in Cape Elizabeth. When I was a small child it was just a single building, the kids section in the basement and the adult section upstairs, and as a precocious six year old I tried to get most of my books from the adult section. The librarians were always a bit suspicious of me – worried, probably, that I would find the artistic photography books with their elegant nudes – and had a tendency to ask whether my parents knew that I was taking out Eisenhower’s history of World War Two, or the biography of Lincoln, or the book on geology from 1928 that explained how Maine’s coastline was formed. Somehow it wasn’t right to them; I should stay downstairs and read the books more suitable for someone of my size.
By the time I was in middle school, skipping grades and being shunned by most classmates for being different, smart and unathletic, I was spending most afternoons there. My dorky friends – the two or three that I hung out with because they were the only ones willing to do so – would use one of the meeting rooms in the now much more spacious “new wing” (actually an old school building that had been abandoned for decades but then repurposed after the town approved a bond measure to renovate it) and we’d play Dungeons and Dragons, cementing permanently my status as lame. That was only once a week or so, though; the other days, I’d grab a few books from the stacks – they had a great selection of chemistry and math textbooks, or if I was feeling literate, I’d grab the illustrated Shakespeare or some Greek philosophers that I knew I was supposed to read but didn’t really understand – and nestle myself in the music room. There were lots of jazz records and a comfy couch, and the room faced southwest, getting lots of winter sun and often putting me to sleep with a book open, Miles Davis on the record player quietly in the background, the door closed because that was allowed in the music room. By this time the librarians were used to me; my card – old fashioned, a folded over bit of ruled paper that tracked the books and their due dates – was probably the most decorated in town. I had discovered the erotic photography by this time, too, but being who I was, I focused a lot more on the chemistry and philosophy.
In university, I wrote my undergraduate thesis on Maine labor history, and I would go to small town libraries in Bath and Thomaston and bigger libraries in Portland and Rockland to look through microfiche and dried out stacks of local newspapers, looking for mentions of union meetings and strikes and lockouts. There is a lovely kind of smell to small town libraries that the bigger ones couldn’t match – mouldering paper, old varnish, the absorbed odour of century old chairs. My thesis was pretty good, although my assigned reader had written two books effectively trashing my thesis that labour history had less to do with Marxist theory than with local conditions, and the grade was just passable for me to graduate with honours – though in fairness, my habit of sleeping through my required core classes in evolutionary biology and 13th century art history may have also contributed to my middling class rank.
After college, though, it stopped. I developed a habit of browsing through used book stores to satisfy my fix for long out of date texts, and then Amazon came along and it all went to hell. I rarely went to bookstores except while in Canada and England, where the books were all subtly different and going to the bookstore formed a key part of my cultural reeducation, and never to libraries. Libraries were sort of hard to find in England, oddly; as I think of it, I couldn’t tell you where there was one. In fact I just looked this up on Google: there’s a library in Blackheath, which I remember, but nothing around where I lived. Odd but probably a telling difference between Southeast England and small town Maine.
So I found myself in the Scarborough library, with stacks much narrower than I remembered (but I was smaller back when I was a permanent citizen of the Thomas Memorial), much fewer of the old out-of-date textbooks and classical literature and a lot more large print pulp fiction. I guess looking back there was the “romance” and “new fiction” sections which I paid absolutely no attention to, but now these were the bulk of the library. Yeah, I’m a snob about that – my dad and my sister love their Robert Patterson, but it’s not for me, and I have to admit (and I say this knowing it makes me a bad person) that I do my best to pretend they’re reading something better. There isn’t anything good or bad about books, of course, and I need to just get over myself.
I went back to the library this afternoon. I’d spent yet another morning doing job search stuff, yet another morning of reassembling my self-esteem and projecting confidence into the void of social networks and the internet with little to no hope of a response, thinking about my son and the girlfriend and my family, sister recovering from surgery at home, dad feeling marginally better from another set of injections in his back, mom volunteering at the elderly home even though she’s probably older than most of them. The dog – his ear a bit crispy after he rubbed it in some melted butter that I spilled on the kitchen floor last night – slept in a sunbeam, and started a bit when I jumped up with a determined look and grabbed the car keys and set off.
The smell in the Scarborough library was the same, even though it has a nice new building. The architects at least preserved the old Maine look – solid brick, sharply pitched roof, circular windows as if it were put together by old shipbuilders in teak instead of by steelworkers and welders. I have no idea how they imported the aroma, though – and the light was exactly as I remembered it as a ten year old, holding my heavy tomes and shuffling towards the music room.
I didn’t linger. I ducked into an aisle on the way to grab a couple of Dutch murder mysteries, and stumbled upon Thomas Mann in his appropriately alphabetical place in the shelves. I grabbed four books altogether, but not to read there: I’m not a kid anymore, and today’s versions of me need to have the music room free for themselves. There were a few of them, reading their smartphones and listening on headphones and with books spread out open in front of them. I’ll read my books on planes, or in the sunroom overlooking the marsh. I checked out and headed home.
A writer friend of mine, in response to an essay I’d forwarded to him, said he writes about subjectivity, regardless of the nominal topic of any given piece of work he produces. I think I write about history – but local history, not the grand arcs. Oddly I find the big picture lamely uninteresting; speculating on the near future is too easy, and too remote, to make it worth my while. I write about the locality of my life, which is strange to say given that I’ve lived, and been willing to live, almost anywhere on earth. But there is a locality that we create, that we invite others into, and that’s what I want to explore.
Only one of my friends growing up shared my love of the Thomas Memorial, and he and I have grown distant – his locality didn’t have room for me and my locality wasn’t open enough to him, so we drifted apart. Otherwise, though, libraries were safe houses for me. They were places that I could melt into on my own, and become a part of a world of words and music and peace that I couldn’t find outside its doors. As an adult, I realize that such spaces are both special and at the same time need to be kept safe for others – and I need to let them go, leaving them to those who really need it, and I need to engage. I think I’ve done reasonably well at that, considering that I remain still pretty dorky and pretty terrifying to most people.
So now I check out books instead of hunkering down in the stacks. But I hope the smell never changes, I hope they find ways to get that old varnish and paper smell into the new libraries they build tomorrow. And I’m very glad to be back in Maine where they survive.