The Library Summer


My mom worked downtown, at Royal Papers Inc. When her live-in boyfriend moved out, we had no adult to keep an eye on us. The three of us would get up at about 6:15, have breakfast, pack a lunch and catch the 7:00 Cherokee bus. My sister and I would get off at the library on Jefferson Avenue, and mom would continue the ride downtown. We would sit outside the library waiting for it to open at 9:00.
When the library opened we would go inside and start reading. On cooler days we would read the books outside, sitting on the limestone steps. On warm days we would read inside, enjoying the luxury of air conditioning. We worked our way through the entire juvenile section and had started in on the adult section by mid-summer. The librarians weren't supposed to let children under 12 into the adult section, but they let us peruse the books as long as they had final say so on whether we could read them or not.
Adult fiction is a wonderful thing. Anne Mc Caffrey, Ray Bradbury, Mark Twain and Edgar Allen Poe lit up my world. They widened my (already large) vocabulary and introduced me to the idea that Life is bigger than your own slice of it. They taught me that people work best when they have other characters to bounce off of. Adult fiction can cover multiple story lines, all meeting and separating, covering an entire fictional world. The Library Summer gave me words for all the feelings and desires I had. There, on paper, were vivid descriptions of everything I had witnessed in my life. Everthing had a reason, everything had a story behind it. Everything had the power to change the world. Every protagonist rose above his (or her) crappy situation, survived all manner of insult, and truimphed in the end.
I'm sorry to say, I blew through those wonderful tales like a kid goes through Halloween candy. I didn't take the time to enjoy them, and I don't remember most of them now. The ones I remember most vividly were the ones I had to put down because I didn't understand them yet. I didn't get sex and intimacy. I didn't get archaic phraseology. I didn't make it past the third page of War of the Worlds. The wording bored me to death. Maybe because I'm a bit dyslexic, some "classics" were nearly impossible for me to struggle my way through. It really frustrated me to return a book unfinished. I felt like the book had defeated me. "It was an epic battle, but Hard Words eventually won out against Simple Stubborness." I would get mad at the cheezy author who just assumed the reader would know what the hell he was talking about. Why would they never explain why Lessa and F'lar were strained after their dragons had mated? Why should I care about an 1800's version of creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water? These books weren't written for a just-turned-11 year old, and I had a lot more living to do before they would make sense.
-wow, went off on a tangent there, didn't I?-
The library closed at 4:30, so we would borrow whichever book we had been immersed in and wait outside for mom's bus to come by. Every ten minutes, we'd hear a bus coming and lift our heads, watching for any sign of mom's distinctive orange afro. The bus would pass, or stop to let off passengers, and we'd go back to reading. Eventually we'd see her, pressed up to the window, smiling and waving. We would ride the bus home with her, basking in her love of us. The hunger pangs would slip away as we fed our real hunger- the hunger for companionship.