Bookmobile

I grew up across the street from a triangle-shaped park. There was a climber that we called the rocket, a swing set with three long swings (the fourth was almost always thrown up halfway over the bar, just out of reach) a teeter-totter, and the famous swinging gate. I believe it was the world’s only swinging gate. I have never seen another.

It looked like a red wooden slat garden gate but was attached to a pole down one side and could swivel 360 degrees, like one of those noisemakers you whiz around in your hand on New Year’s Eve. If I held onto the top of the slat opposite the pole and had a friend push the gate round and round, I could lift my feet when we got going fast enough and fly around in a circle exactly parallel to the ground. It was amazing. If you could hold on.

The centrifugal force was 10 times that experienced inside an atom smasher, but, of course, there were boys in the neighborhood who could hold on forever. I only remember the feeling of my fingers slipping like I was clinging to a ledge of the Sears Tower and then flinging into space before the dull thud and momentary darkness. You had to watch out for the nearby wooden slat bench, its metal steel legs anchored in concrete. That could be rough. You had to stand back far enough when someone else was mid-flight or you could get a good dose of foot-in-face at 700 MPH. What a ride.

But the best form of transportation at the park was our local library’s long green bookmobile that came once a week in the summer, always parking directly across from our house on the other side of the tip of the triangle.

You opened the mobile home door and stepped into an air-conditioned, gutted whale with floor-to-ceiling shelves for ribs. The coolness made you catch you breath in July, and you got the chills even though you were sweaty and miserable two seconds before.

Did I stop at the adult paperback shelf and stare at the cover of Coma every time? That man suspended from the ceiling by wires attached to his skin. Lying on his back as if in bed. What was that about? Adult books were so weird.

My friend, Jay, and I would usually head down the clear plastic carpet protector to the back and kneel to pull every UFO book from the bottom shelf. We had work to do. One couldn’t be too careful. We had to know the cigar-shaped spacecraft as well as the obvious disc-shaped ones. And the ones disguised as weather balloons weren’t fooling us.

After some research, we might lighten things up a bit with pictures of the wolf man, Frankenstein’s monster, mummies. And I remember staring a long time at a black and white photo of Count Orlok from Nosferatu.

Sometimes I’d check out some girl novels, Beverly Cleary and the lighter Judy Blumes while Jay picked up a few things to help with our detective business. A couple of times we got kicked out for playing too roughly and loudly with the puppets in the back flip-top bench.

We’d take our books up to the front where the driver’s seat would be turned exactly around to face a pop-up desk, the checkout counter! They’d stamp our books and take the cards out to file.

Is it only in my memory that they let us stay on while they circled the park one day? I’m not sure. I can see myself perched next to Jay between the Librarian Pilot and Librarian Co-pilot as we lapped the park. Why do I also see us wearing cowboy hats and whooping it up as we passed the police officer’s house, my grandma’s corner, the Andersons’, and then Jay’s house and my house as we triumphantly came around the tip of the triangle?

Sometimes, Jay’s older sister Jill would be one of two bookmobile librarians. More often it was Lynn driving with a co-pilot named Chuck, I think. She once told me, years later, that Chuck used to say he thought I’d grow up to be a librarian. I did end up working at the library for a while. She also said that someone in the northern suburbs of Chicago bought the bookmobile and still drove it around their town.

I like to think of our bookmobile still running somewhere. A big green mobile home making laps around a park with a couple of kids in cowboy hats. What a ride.