your local library.

A few days ago I dropped J off at work in the evening and then drove up the road to the local library, the first time I've been there since we got back. When I lived here years ago, I would be at the library multiple times a week. I lived in a crowded house full of people, and the library was a quiet, peaceful escape. This particular library has amazing books, and always an incredible selection of new books. There’s a wall of great movies. Back then, before I had an iPhone or iPod or any device, I would still check out a pile of CDs every week to listen to in the car while I drove around the Cape. And there’s a small performance space at the library - an airy room with a grand piano and art hanging on the walls. I would practice and play the piano back then, and the librarians kindly allowed me to come in and play that beautiful piano when the room wasn’t being used for something else.

But my clearest and most profound memory at this library is one particular aisle in the stacks, towards the back of the library, against a wall. There are three shelves of poetry (where I first read Mary Oliver - a local here, so well represented). There’s a shelf of essays and a shelf of literary criticism. There’s a shelf of athletic guidebooks - I once checked out a marathon-running guide from that shelf. And finally, there are two shelves of writing guidebooks - nonfiction, fiction, children’s literature, poetry, and so on. I can distinctly remember standing in front of that shelf, back when I had only the inclination that maybe I wanted to write, and picking up Writing Down the Bones. You know by now that this book is basically one of the great love stories of my life (thus far). I checked it out, and not long after, I went to Newcomb Hollow with a black and white composition notebook I had bought at the Staples in Orleans.

I had never tried to write that way before - just wild freewriting. It did not come easily. It felt awkward. But I still remember sitting there on that beach, feeling like I was being struck by lightning, and thinking, HOLY SHIT this is it.

So I went back to that library earlier this week, and it is remarkably unchanged in the four years I’ve been gone. It looks exactly the same. The same two librarians are working there (!). My name was still in the system, so for a dollar, I was issued a new library card. And the aisle where I had some kind of spiritual awakening is still there, still exactly the same. I stood there and ran my eyes over the books and remembered which ones I had checked out, which I had finished, which were boring. It was like an extension of my own bookshelves, and even of myself. It’s rare, I think, to be able to see an old version of yourself lined up against the current version - to see what has changed and what is the same. To be aware of how you are still that old person, but you are also someone completely new.

And that is a reason to support your local library.