Ginger’s Library-Lovin’ Guest Post!
Posted in Libraries, Vermont College of Fine Arts on 03/31/2011 12:47 pm by jessTo add spice to our week, I’ve asked my friend from the Vermont College MFA program, Ginger Johnson (whose blog you can read here), to share her love of libraries. I had a strong hunch that there was a long and varied romance here, and I was right! This time in the comments, maybe you’ll share little library memory from your childhood. Or you can always say, “I love libraries!” and I’ll donate a dollar for that. (For more details on this challenge, go here.) And now…
Love Song for a Library
the author and her sister
In the beginning was the Word. In her beginnings, there was a book. Her mother told her she could read before she started kindergarten, and she started kindergarten at age four. Each week, she would walk with her grandmother and older sister the nine or ten city blocks to their local branch of the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library, a low brick building down a side street.
There, she and her sister would settle in the children’s section, while their grandmother browsed through paperback mysteries and Regency romances. She remembers little of that library—windows, low shelves, Ezra Jack Keats’ A Snowy Day, and the front desk, where a stereotypically severe-looking librarian stamped their books with a heavy rubber stamp—ka-thunk!
By the time she was in fifth grade, her mother was in graduate school studying to become an elementary school librarian. Long Saturday afternoons were spent in Lockwood Library at the university: Mom at the copier with piles of coins, sister claiming the best of the blocky chairs available. The options were limited. Ride the elevator up and down, up and down. Run out to the vending machines, having first snatched a quarter from her mother’s towering pile. Quarter in, press F8, curly-cue swivels around, out pops frosted nut brownie. Or, of course, there were the stacks.
Mostly, she spent time in the stacks. One single row of children’s books, mostly books that sported shiny gold Newbery stickers. Somehow she got her hands on a bookmark that listed all the Newbery award winners, and she decided she would read them. Some of her favorite books were Newberies: A Wrinkle in Time, Tuck Everlasting, Bridge to Terabithia, The Westing Game, Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH. They were quickly joined by Summer of the Swans, My Side of the Mountain, The Witch of Blackbird Pond, The Great Gilly Hopkins, A Ring of Endless Light.
She remembers, though, mostly spending those afternoons with E.L. Konigsburg. Oh, they weren’t on a first-name basis, she and E.L., but nevertheless, she became great friends with Claudia and Jamie, wishing more than anything that she could stay in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, that she could go to an automat (What was an automat, anyway?). She thrilled to the sound of Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley, and Me, Elizabeth. She gobbled up About the B’nai Bagels, while developing A Proud Taste for Scarlet and Miniver. She even became Father’s Arcane Daughter for a while.
Those Saturday afternoons ceased, but she found other libraries to haunt. She could make a dot-to-dot design on a map of the United States of libraries she has frequented over her lifetime. It would undoubtedly look like an open book. Some of those libraries don’t exist anymore; some of them have expanded. All of them have been important to her. This one is the one she went to in college, studying with her roommates while wearing large hats (to channel the brain-waves, of course). This one she frequented when she was first married, borrowing books with unlikely plots and even more unlikely heroines. That is the one she walked to with her first baby, borrowing books on child development, as well as board books and movies for cheap date nights.
This library, here, was one of her favorites. She brought her toddler there for story time, but also to see the fish in the fish tank, and to work the puzzles on the table, and to borrow picture books to read to him, and CDs to listen to (a compilation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s poems set to music was her favorite). It was there that she returned to her love of children’s literature, often grabbing Anne of Green Gables off the shelf to read while her gingerbread boy played quietly. It was here that she realized she liked children’s literature better than literature for adults.
Now she frequents her current town library, an old schoolhouse built in the 1800s. It is a place where the librarians not only know her name, they know her library card number. She also volunteers in the elementary school library, where she returns dozens and dozens of books back to their places on the shelves. Sometimes, though, she sees a book that catches her eye, and she sits down right in the stacks, caught up in the pleasure of a book, just like she did when she was in fifth grade. Some things never change.
Ginger today. I don't think she's even seen this photo!
03/31/2011 at 4:15 pm
You know what I loved most about libraries as a child, and now, too? You can take out SO MANY books at once. It’s totally okay to be greedy!
03/31/2011 at 4:38 pm
A world of agreement, Emily! You can take as much as you can humanly carry.
Bonus question: what *is* E.L. Koningsburg’s first name? Elaine? I, too, loved Father’s Arcane Daughter–we’ll have to discuss!
03/31/2011 at 4:45 pm
I was an Air Force brat…in each new town I would seek out the school library AND the local public library. They became my refuge and I found my old friends in books. I always knew however my life changed, I could always find a safe harbor in the library.
03/31/2011 at 4:59 pm
Ginger was my first penpal. We shared a lot of books in those letters. Love, love, LOVE the post, Ging!
03/31/2011 at 5:12 pm
Wonderful post—libraries are so important to everyone! What wonderful ways to express that
03/31/2011 at 6:30 pm
I went to grad school with Ginger’s mom. My children also played in the stacks at Lockwood, while we researched a variety of projects for a variety of professors. That’s where my son met Ginger’s best friend; they are now married, the parents of two of our most adorable grandsons.
Libraries are magical.
03/31/2011 at 8:08 pm
In a world full of “No” I love that in the library I can always say “yes”. Yes to myself for any book I want. Yes to my kids for the 20-30 books they want. I can even bring a surprise home to my husband. I can fill my family up and not spend one penny. I feel that my house is richer every time I bring home that huge over stuffed bag of books!
04/01/2011 at 5:53 pm
I love love love the huge children’s wing at our library. I love that the librarians know us, and that there are tons of fun activities for kids to play with in between books, and that thousands of even the littlest kids are learning to LOVE the library because it’s such a kid-friendly place. Oh, and I love filling our giant Ikea bag to the brim with lots and lots of books!
04/01/2011 at 6:34 pm
Not exactly a childhood memory, but I think often of the experience of living abroad and NOT having public libraries in the country where I lived – I would get something I called “LWS” (Library Withdrawal Syndrome) which made me curl up on a couch and cry. I think the free public library system is the best thing about this country (free access to information and art across all social strata) and to see libraries now underfunded and hurting is to wonder about our recent priorities. Thanks, Jess and Ginger, for your contributions.
04/01/2011 at 10:14 pm
May I “Like” Susan’s comment, above? Even before I met her son, my once and future husband, in a library, I loved libraries! I can trace the path from my house to my library for every place I’ve ever lived – even that summer place I stayed in for a week once when I was eleven or twelve. I had to mail myself a letter, to prove I lived in the town, to get a card. It took two days for the letter to arrive but arrive it did and the librarian gave me a card and I checked out more books than I could comfortably carry up the hill and stayed up all night reading them. Nothing beats a library for helping you feel at home in a new place! Or, in my case, for meeting a husband…mine’s a keeper.
04/02/2011 at 12:20 am
When I was a kid my mom would take all five of us down to the public library, where we all took out 10 books at a time. I looked for the ones that had been read so many times the pages were soft. That meant they were good. I also copied my biggest sister, Jana, because we had the same sensibilities. We kept on giving each other books from the “kid’s” section into our adulthood. I love looking in the non-fiction section at all the craft books, or the travel ones, or any other topic that lots of people want to tell you about. It makes me love people even more than ever.
04/02/2011 at 5:38 am
Amen, Ginger. Libraries are community treasures and too often unsung (and unfunded). If I ever get rich I’m going to leave a chunk of it to my local library. Maybe they’ll mount of bust of me in the foyer. Now there’s a thought.
04/03/2011 at 12:21 pm
I moved frequently as a child. A new house in a new state every few years. I mark the years I spent in each city as much by my memories of the libraries as by the homes or the schools.
In Oshkosh, Wisconsin: the library with two stone lion sentinels out front, (I recently Googled that library, the lions are still there) where my brother and I would go to escape the summer heat and watch old movies projected onto a wall.
In Cincinnati, Ohio: the school librarian who fed me butterscotch candies and assured me that “Yes, I really had read every Nancy Drew novel in existence.”
In Norcross, Georgia: as a teenager where I filled my friendless hours hiding on a bean bag reading and rereading my way through the pitifully small YA fantasy section rather than brave my tumultuous home.
I have loved reading these comments and finding out so many others loved libraries, not just for the trove of books they contained but for sanctuary the building themselves seem to represent. Even now when I visit my library adjacent to the local highschool, there is a constant smattering of teenagers filling after school hours before they head home. Writing, reading, drawing, (even occasionally nodding off) and I am comforted that there is still this place of peace for them among the books. I pray that this will always the case.
10/29/2015 at 12:26 am
that it was his bourgeois selbisinities which led him to be defensive about showing poverty. Some said it was because of his upper-class privileged upbringing that he had little idea of true human misery.(These incidentally were the same criticisms against Rabindranath Tagore). My take is that rather than being bookishly c3a2e2‚acc5“grittyc3a2e2‚acc29d, as in showing people vomiting on a glass screen and taking a shot from below ( a scene which I have actually seen in an Indian c3a2e2‚acc5“artc3a2e2‚acc29d movie popular on the festival circuit), Ray relied on indirection, symbolism, shot composition and use of light and shade to convey his message in a more cinematically aesthetic way. Likewise, Boyle could have used a number of ways to show extreme love for Bollywood celebrities but he chose the c3a2e2‚acc5“easy way outc3a2e2‚acc29dc3a2e2‚ace2€9dthe c3a2e2‚acc5“shock and awec3a2e2‚acc29d strategy. Using perhaps the most gratuitously odious and heavy-handed way of getting the message across [a sentiment echoed here], he no doubt grabbed attention and pleased the crowd but the mechanism through which he achieved this can hardly be considered to be a great example of the director’s craft as it is defined by the c3a2e2‚acc5“Oscar and Cannesc3a2e2‚acc29d aesthetic. That in a nutshell is the difference between Ray’s depiction of poverty and Boyle’sc3a2e2‚ace2€9dit’s not the depiction of extreme poverty that makes Slumdog ordinary but the way Boyles chooses to do so that is.