My hometown’s library looks like more of a small house. In fact, many of the businesses in my hometown were once quaint homes — the daycare, the karate studio. Actually, that one was a small schoolhouse, but you understand. There are little actual business buildings, except for the one strip, if you could call it that, that sits on the corner of Main and Broad, and those never hold the same business for more than a year. There was a piano studio, an ice cream shop — Lord knows what else. But down the road, past the post office, before you reach the ball fields where I once played pitcher and short stop and catcher, there is the library. If there weren’t a parking lot and a sign claiming it as such, you’d swear you were passing just another house.
When you walk inside, there is a table lined with old computers, and books are cramped into every possible space. There’s a children’s room off to the right and the romance section sits snugly in the left corner adjacent to the main desk, with a couch and a coffee table and room to make yourself at home. I remember stacks of books and magazines piled high and nigh behind that desk, and the British librarian with the short, dark curls and dewy skin always seemed so withdrawn, yet somehow comfortable in her movements. Maybe she just wasn’t fond of the youth, or didn’t know how to relate to them. Maybe we looked too ruggedly Southern.
The summer I got my license, my friend, Shannon, and I drove there for fun. There was nothing I liked more than scanning the rows of peeling, dusty books for my next greatest read. Who had checked them out? Did they enjoy the story? Or was that splotch of dried coffee the result of a protesting swing of the hand. How could she do that to him? The library was not open everyday, and some days it closed early. I remember thinking how cozy the librarian must have felt in her job, in such a small town. I couldn’t fathom that she might feel drastically disjointed in my sheltered, small-town frame of mind. That town was all I knew besides the outskirts of neighboring states and a cruise to the Caribbean. I didn’t think to wonder about which part of the United Kingdom from which she hailed and why she left in the first place. I just noticed the accent I’d heard in movies and took her at face value, but now I don’t believe she was someone to be taken so thinly. I never did have the mentality of a Francie Nolan.
The libraries I frequent now feel cookie-cutter in comparison. They are not so modern to make the experience a unique and interesting one, but they are not so modest as to make them warm and personable. They feel as though they are dated in the way of poodle skirts and broached cardigans, stuck in routine and lacking in character. When I think of libraries, I want to think of the small British lady with the dewy skin behind the desk who made eye contact and wished you a nice day, rather than the librarian you never see sitting in his office within the depths of the building. But, then, I guess a lot of new things can’t measure up to the first. For some it’s the first love, for others it’s the first library.