Recently I was on a train traveling from France to Germany and had one of those strange moments of floating displacement, looking out the window with amazement and unease and thinking However did this happen?
I certainly was not born to have this life; I was never meant to move more than six miles from the homestead on the northern end of the Kitsap Peninsula.
It occurred to me then that the reason might be simple: my home county had a truly great children’s librarian.
When we were small she read to us with a large dragon puppet on her shoulder. When we were older she made sure that we had access to high quality, challenging books – pushing us to participate in summer reading programs with incentives, yes, but at the same time making sure we knew which books had been banned in other areas, and talking about the underlying issues.
I finished all of the kid and juvenile books (reading alphabetically through the stacks) by age eleven, when she pointed me onward to the classics most suitable to encourage a lifelong reading habit.
Literature was a revelation, the only possible escape from a life mired in the muck of cancer and poverty, before video games and cable television offered quick fixes.
What else did I have going on? Nothing whatsoever: for years I was either in the hospital or sitting on a stack of tires in the back room of a gas station.
Cue maudlin violin music here.
The librarian changed my life, but also other lives through me – even when they were little, my kids read comics, but also the New Yorker. They were denied television and video games in preference for literature, and they are both (while admittedly eccentric) excessively bright and verbal, with vocabularies far beyond many people who have finished a PhD.
My daughter is grown-up now, with a bruising and urgent need to discuss philosophy that often leaves me clutching my hair and moaning.
My son has been a massive P.G. Wodehouse fan since age three, and has recently been on a Louisa May Alcott binge. He is also reading the Anne of Green Gables series – and enjoying it far more than anything published in his lifetime.
Who knows where any of us will end up; the point is, reading books gave us the freedom to go.
I feel a great debt to that modest, determined, rural librarian.
When I went home for the funeral of my namesake the librarian spoke to the assembled crowd, and I would have liked to tell her how much her work meant to me. It just didn’t seem like the right moment, and besides, I suspect we are both too shy for that conversation.
