I found this post on another blog entitled "She said, She said." and I could not resist sharing. The author is Marion Roach. When you're done reading, please go to her blog and tell her how much you enjoyed it. She has given me her permission to reprint it here.
I WAS BORN in the Little Neck Branch of the New York Public library system. Right next to the card catalogue. That’s the way I remember it, and I’m sticking to that story no matter what, as well as to the version that I also came of age there, and engaged in all manners of important transitions in or because of the library. And do you doubt me?
Well, you may doubt that all these rites of passage were performed in that same library. And you’d be right. They were spread out over the libraries of my life, a sisterhood I remember with unsurpassable affection.
As soon as I could drive, I ventured into a library not my own; I crossed counties, into Nassau, having heard that Great Neck had a fine library. It did, right on a cove of Long Island Sound. A ringer, I found a carrel there and sat through high school. Not that my spooky American Gothic Architecture girls’ school didn’t have a library. It did, complete with a terrifying professional spinster librarian and dark, musty reading rooms. But now I had three libraries: My own, in Little Neck, my school’s and this secret one I sneaked to in Great Neck, pretending I belonged, and where I wrote a paper for my tenth grade honor’s English class in which I brazenly debated whether it was Samuel Bowles or Thomas Wentworth Higginson who was, in fact, the secret — until now! — lover of Emily Dickinson. My English teacher was appalled. She honestly thought that Emily, all those long years upstairs in her room, dressed in white, had been writing to God. Clearly my teacher didn’t know that Emily was a redhead.
Off to college. This added a magnificent library to my collection: St Lawrence Universoty’s Owen D. Young library, open at night, sometimes all night. What a haven. And then, on a semester in Nairobi, I discovered the University of Nairobi Library, high-ceilinged and stocked with European newspapers, and these ancient, fabulous colonial editions of things like folio editions of William Shakespeare’s sonnets, which I discovered just as I fell deeply in love for the very first time, sitting there afternoons in the library, pouring over these magnificent crumbly pages, reading Mr. Shakespeare and writing sonnet after sonnet to a relentlessly undeserving man. Two more libraries under my belt, I was home for senior year, Thanksgiving, when I discovered the New York Public on 5th Ave had what I needed for a college paper. Oh, the first time I climbed those lion-gated steps and discovered that people – me – could go there.
The January term of my senior year, I found myself in the library at the great University of Bologna, in Italy. After a bit of vino – they drank at that library, in the stacks! – discussing Emily Dickinson, with the library’s dashing, thought terribly scholarly, poetry expert and, as the party progressed, I remember we stood against the cool old stone wall and after some time, kind of slid to the floor, wineglasses in hand, reciting Emily Dickinson to one another, me in English, him in Italian. Oh, the good clean fun you can have in a library.
It was helpful that my first job out of college was at The New York Times, one of its best features being that it is around the corner from the New York Public. So it got a lot of use. I started to think of it as my library, cozying up to it after some time, as we grew more comfortable with one another.
In the course of writing my four books I have spent time in some lovely libraries, the New York Public, of course, but also the Folger, in Washington where Richard Kuhta, the librarian once surprised me, handing me something, down in the basement. It was the Bible Anne Boleyn carried on her wedding day. To be trusted to touch something like that meant to me that I had earned some esteem as a book person, someone who loved them I did. And so it was their research librarian, Elizabeth Walsh, who I turned several years later when writing my recent book, to explain to me the meaning of the red wig worn by Shylock on the debut of William Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice.
I could go on, and frequently do on the topic of libraries, whose roles in our lives are many and varied, but are always positive. As one smart friend of mine said recently, “A library card is the most powerful hand held device you have.”
And yet I read that all over America libraries are under attack. In my home area this is certainly true. Albany, NY, residents will be asked to vote today on the proposed 2012 library tax levy that includes an increase of 32 cents per $1,000 of assessed value, for most meaning an increase of 91 cents each week for the privilege of fine library system.
You would think it would be a slam dunk. It won’t, despite the fact that the new budget will be one-time correction that follows a magnificent recent spate of building resulting in the opening of five new and renovated neighborhood libraries in Albany, the issuing of more than 10,000 new library cards, the acquisition of 86 percent more books, DVDs and other materials, and 244 percent more computers to maintain. Oh yes, and visits are up nearly 20 percent.
Me, I’ll be clutching a book to my heart all day, hoping for the very best from my upstate neighbors.
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