POSSIBILITY

I cannot call it my first real job, but the first job I had for more than a couple of months was at the local library in my small hometown in southwest Virginia. What a blessing. I still remember going for my interview with the director, a bit of a severe and stern woman it seemed to me at the time, but who I came to know for her dedication and for her understated kindness. I wore corduroy pants and an overly serious wool coat to our meeting after school. It was a cold and snowy afternoon and I was as nervous as I could be. After all, at the ripe age of sixteen, I was vying for my dream job. Despite the clarity of certain details in my memory of that meeting, I do not recall our conversation much at all, except to imagine that, as such a rather dull and shy kid, I was probably lucky to get the job. I could not have been more excited when I did.

At the time, the Vaughan Memorial Library was in a little, old house on Stuart Drive and had been there for as long as I could remember. It was not an especially impressive building at all and was showing more than its share of wear and tear. I used to shudder at the prospect of having to go into the basement to file back issues of periodicals. It might as well have been a dungeon. I would race back up the shaky stairs, flipping off lights behind me as I went, never looking back. When I joined the staff, the library was finishing up the process of converting the checkout system from the card-in-the-back-cover days to a barcode system. Each and every volume in the building had to be barcoded and electronically cataloged, a tedious and tiresome project, even for such a modest collection as could be found there. It seems quaint and unimaginable now that, even in the early 1990s, the computerization of the library was only just beginning to happen. Remembering this, I recently found myself trying to explain to my daughter what a card catalog was. Try as I did, the concept was completely alien to her. Tiny drawers? Cards in the back of books with lines of date stamps? How did we ever survive?

Survive I did. I ate it up. I read nearly everything I could get my hands on, except for that sagging shelf of Danielle Steele books, of course. I swear I never cracked open one of them, not even out of curiosity, though they were likely high on the list of the most circulated volumes in the place. In my innocence, I took great thrill in my furtive and quick reads of the newest bestsellers as they waited behind the desk with me for the next patron on the reserve list, feeling as if I was enjoying privileged access somehow by reading them before anyone else. I would dream up, and sometimes complete, nerdy challenges for myself, like starting with "A" and reading the entire fiction section. That one did not happen, but I am fairly certain I read ninety percent of the biographies and there was probably more than one occasion when I made it through an entire letter of the alphabet. It was in my pillaging of those shelves of fiction that I came to revere the writing of Ernest Hemingway. And, it was also where I first became a true political wonk as I plowed through the 973 section in the non-fiction room. As you are already indulging me in this tribute to libraries, I will refrain from expounding on the beauty of the Dewey Decimal System or any tretise on the merits of it as compared to the Library of Congress System. Speaking of filing, my job at the library only cultivated my burgeoning obsessive/compulsiveness and most likely helped to ingrain it into my psyche. I was comforted looking out from my perch behind the circulation desk, knowing everything had its proper place and that it was my responsibility to make sure of this. There were reams of information before me, all easily found if you knew how to look -- by flipping through those tiny drawers. There was a certain grace in the organization of it all, a clarity and certainty of oneself in the midst of chaos.

I am still a library guy. As much as I love the mere physical presence of books, not to mention the look, feel, and smell of books, I rarely purchase books. Do not get me wrong, our home is full of them. They are the one purchase in which we readily indulge our child, almost without question. The number of books that belong to her in this house would likely rival the number that belong to the adults, in fact. Nevertheless, I rarely buy books for myself for many reasons, not the least of which are the challenges of budget and space. Also, there are so many books I want to read that there are very few I take the time to read again, so it would also be a matter of tremendous waste to have them only for lying around or being stacked neatly on shelves untouched. Mostly, though, I find the whole idea behind what happens in libraries as immensely noble. At its most basic, a library is a repository of information, but a library also speaks to our highest ideals of freedom, democracy, and a well-informed and active and engaged citizenry. Not only do libraries catalog and store the information, they make it readily available for anyone who desires to to use and see and enjoy it. For free. All they ask is that you bring the information back with you in the near future unscathed so that someone else may also use and enjoy it. Then there are all the things community libraries do to make the places we live all the better: story times for children, providing places to study and to be tutored, access to computers, availabilty of newspapers that are read the world over, reading groups, and I could go on, but the most important detail would be the one simple yet powerful thing libraries stand for, the sheer idea of literacy.

Since that little hometown library I have sought out and seen many libraries in many places. From the New York Public Library to the university libraries of places like Harvard and Princeton to other small libraries in rural towns, I have made a point to visit and to make use of them. No matter their size or their reputation, they all have given me the same sense of wonderment and immense possibility. And maybe that is really what it comes down to for me: all those books in one place, just sitting there, waiting to be read.

National Library Week