My Library

It was Labor Day Weekend, time to close our Illinois in-ground pool for another season. School had started, and although it was hot that day, we’d be lucky for two more good swims. “Better to close it now, while we can,” Dad would say.

My brothers and I were sucking popsicles watching the Jerry Lewis Telethon in the family room, the untimely, smokey smell of our fireplace swirling in the humidity despite the fact that its glass doors had been closed since April. We were thick and bored and lazy and stuck to the gold shag carpet like wolfhounds.

I wandered out to dad whose top half of his body was hanging over the side of the half-empty pool. Two Shop Vacs were screaming into the afternoon as they blew out the pipes so that no drop of water would be left in them over the winter to freeze and crack the plastic. Mom was holding one in place on one side of the pool while Dad was duct-taping the other across from her. He’d already taken out the underwater light and set it on the concrete sidewalk poolside. We were getting close. He’d need all hands on deck for lifting the heavy woven canvas cover in place over the pool and securing it with heavy-duty plastic bags full of water as weights. I dreaded it. We all had to lift and hold something 100 times our scrawny-necked weights while Dad ran around getting every last thing set. It was hot. Mosquitoes usually swarmed when you needed both hands to hold, and you were helpless against their many stings.

“Dad.”

“Hand me that other roll of tape. What?”

“Can Jay and I go for a walk?”

“I’m gonna need you here.”

“You said you still have to mess with the pump thingy. Can we just go to the library?”

“Yeah, I guess. This is going to take me longer than I thought, “ he said after a moment, as he came back up to a sitting position. “Where’s your brother?”

“Inside. I’ll get him.” I ran back to the screen door and yelled, “Danny! Dad wants you!”
and tore off out the front gate to Jay’s, next door. “Let’s get out of here!” I said when Jay appeared at his screen door, “get your library card.”

The library was our farthest boundary at that time. It was about six months before we would extend our wanderings to the high school tennis court for our new serious recreation of opening a can of yellow balls and hitting them a few times over the net before sitting against the chain link fence and chewing Starbursts till our teeth ached. It was about a year before we’d stumble upon the maudlin pastime of going to local cemeteries, finding the graves of our distant relatives, brushing them off, and mourning for lack of something else to do.

The library was about eight blocks from our house. It was a serious walk. First we would stop at the Confectionary to buy watermelon Jelly Bellys, always worrying how to best secret them in the library where no food was allowed. We never thought ahead to bring plastic zip up bags that would be quieter than the cellophane bags they came in. Putting them straight in your pockets just made them sweaty and smeary, and your hands turned all green and red.

Jay and I would walk and talk about where we wished we could travel, how when we were adults we would build slides in our houses and have secret rooms and a huge treefort.

We talked about Star Wars.

“What do you think they’re really swimming in in that garbage compactor scene? What are all the black plastic things floating around? I mean, that’s their garbage? You know when they’re at the table at Uncle Owen’s and Aunt Beru’s? Are they drinking blue milk? My mom has Tupperware glasses like that. We should use them next time. And we could put food coloring in the milk, okay?” We liked authenticity.

“Yeah, blue milk is more ‘space’ than white milk,” Jay said as he pulled a Star Wars guy from his pocket and licked the watermelon sugar from its head.

We would argue about how to pronounce Princess Leia’s name, and how I thought that the stormtroopers all had the word “OIL” in raised letters on their backs. Did I see them as space-age gas station attendants? Did I think that’s where the oil went in to power them up?

“They’re people in there. That’s why Han and Luke knock those two out and take their suits. What if we could see all the stormtroopers without their suits on? They’d just be a bunch of guys,” Jay said. He was right.

We walked. And walked. And walked.

Ahead of us, at the library would be our favorite books, our favorite characters: Trixie Belden and her friend Honey Wheeler, Nancy Drew, Encyclopedia Brown, Ozma and Mombi of Oz, the Hardy Boys. Sitting low on a shelf in the 130’s we would find the book about Uri Gellar, the Israeli psychic who could bend people’s forks and spoons over the radio. I would probably check out a book called The Girl Who Talked to Ghosts and one called Ghostly Animals, but the best ghost book was Southern Ghosts by Nancy Roberts. It had spooky black and white photos with captions like, “The Phantom Stallion,” “The Light on the Porch Blinked Off,” and the chilling “Railroad Bill Could Turn Himself into a Hound.”

There would be the usual books on ESP to examine and two whole shelves full of books on ancient Egypt. I would look for the one on Howard Carter and flip through it till I found those two photographs. One: the close-up of the handles of the locked doors to Tut’s tomb. Still sealed. Untouched since the ancient Egyptian men who closed them walked away. Two: Howard Carter, the archaeologist himself, crouching on one knee, wide-eyed, loose-jawed, looking at the treasures just out of reach.

The library that I take my daughters to every week now is the same one I went to as a child. Most weeks, we leave with more books than we can easily carry. Books for homeschool history, some of those very same books on ancient Egypt. I tell them that the library elves live behind the trap door in the ceiling in the staircase between the children’s floor and the main floor. We have peeked into the old dumb waiter on the second floor near the 200’s, but now it has a lock on it.

The best time to be there is at night. It is cozy and book-y and warm, and everyone is busy looking things up or doing reports for school or running a finger along a shelf reading titles in a whispered breath. There’s the woman who still comes in for 5 new magazines each week, the man who waits at the front door every morning to be the first to get the daily local paper all to himself. Once, I saw an old man by the fireplace reading a book called The Basics of Baseball. It was spread open on his lap, and he was practicing a grip with his two hands, comparing it to a diagram on the page.

I remember Dad taking me to the library as a kid only once at night. We were checking out 8mm movie reels for my birthday party. I remember how it was lit so differently, how the two-story windows on the east and west sides of the great room were black and reflected everything inside. I couldn’t see the trees. It was more hushed at night. I remember holding Dad’s hand and waiting at the worn wooden counter for the librarian to help us.

Sometimes when I walk along the sidewalk by the library now, carrying a stack of books up to my chin, my eyes move along the names in stone: Aristotle, Socrates, Homer, Shakespeare, and I picture me and Jay that day of the pool closing, rounding the corner of the sloping concrete garden walls that we used to climb, that my daughters climb now. Jay and I finally get there to stand at the handles of the locked doors. The sign reads “Closed Labor Day.” Maybe it’s just my conscience at taking too long, leaving Dad when I knew he’d need me. In my mind, I hear him twenty-some years ago and eight blocks away calling me back home, but Jay and I step aside to the plate glass window, each crouch down on one knee, wide-eyed, loose-jawed, looking at the treasures just out of reach.