library?

I love libraries. Some of my earliest memories are of summer afternoon trips to the library of my youth. My mother would lead my sister and me up the rather grand (for our tiny town) front steps, all of us decked out in proper afternoon wear including, in the earliest years, gloves and hats.

We'd spend hours choosing the week's reading material, always with recommendations from the librarian, who took a special interest in two tiny, voracious readers. My mother would vanish into the adult stacks where we were expressly forbidden to follow. Upon occasion, we'd steal around the corner just to gaze at the mysterious dark aisles where the grownups went, marveling at the towers of books crammed onto the shelves, wishing we could experience those wonders ourselves.

When I started skipping school in 8th grade, a smarty pants straight A ultra confident student run aground on the shoals of pre-algebra, I only skipped across the street from my junior high, straight up those grand steps and into the periodicals room of the library. There, I'd spend the rest of the school day reading everything I could get my hands on. I was particularly enthralled by news magazines and I read them all indiscriminately: US News & World Report, The Nation, Newsweek, Time, Life, Look, National Review, New Republic.

Within a few months, I discerned a difference and, baby Democrat that I was, focused on the more progressive of the news magazines, plus the New Yorker, Village Voice, Rolling Stone. When I found the New York Times and Washington Post, I was exhilarated and I began to crave those afternoons of reading as something delicious and separate from my wish to escape the trials of mathematics.

I dreamed of being somewhere else on those forays to the library. Much of the time I dreamed of being someone else, someone interesting and alive, living an exciting life vastly different from a Ponca City East Junior High School 8th grader's. In that sunny corner of the library, buried in periodicals of every kind, I became aware of the world in a completely new and inspiring way. I began to realize that my life was mine alone and I could live it any way I wanted to. There was much going on in the world that was not evident in that small town: I couldn't wait to grow up and get out in it. The library did that for me.

My grandsons have never been inside one. They buy the occasional book at Target, at Borders. But they're not big readers, the two older boys. They have an immense collection of DVDs: action movies, everything Disney, and a pile of games to play on their whatever-it's-called-this-year electronic game player. I think they're missing out on something important and in writing that I feel somewhat like a grouchy old fuck.

That brand of obsession with reading, with books, with a wish to know what's happening elsewhere, I think it's dying out. I don't wish my grandsons would skip school and head off to read, but I do wish they could develop some sense of a world larger than the one we inhabit in this community, this state, this country, and I don't want that world to be something that exists only in the software of a computer.

I go to a little branch library now, the one close to my house. I order my books online or go over for an evening to see what's on the shelves. I love my local place; it has the classic scent of old paper and binding materials and that exquisite hush that makes everything seem just a little more special. My library is furnished with grand antique mission oak furniture. I check out 5-6 books every week or two; the librarians love me and make recommendations of reading material they think I'll like. They're quick to reassure me when I ask every month or so if George Bush and his squad of thugs can access my list of reading material, and they laugh with me as I wonder aloud whether that paranoia is justified.

I often wish that I could skip out of my life for an entire day and sink into the luxury of having an excess of time and an endless supply of books. I'd head to the giant library downtown, sneak in my thermos of coffee and make piles of magazines and books and papers that strike my fancy. Then I'd binge on the dual treats of time and reading.

Do you go to your library? Do you think they're dying out? I can't imagine a world without them, but so many things have vanished just in the last 20 years or so. Could libraries also disappear?