BTT: Libraries

Whether you usually read off of your own book pile or from the library shelves NOW, chances are you started off with trips to the library. (There’s no way my parents could otherwise have kept up with my book habit when I was 10.) So … What is your earliest memory of a library? Who took you? Do you have you any funny/odd memories of the library?

I have a number of early library memories, although I’d be pretty hard-pressed to figure out which one was actually the earliest. We used to go to the kids’ program quite a lot during the summers when I was small, and so most of my early memories centre around that. Here are some images that come to mind:

1) Sitting in a big circle, singing the “Keep Moving!” song with the children’s librarian (you know the one: One finger, one thumb, one arm, one leg, a nod of the head, a sound that goes phbbbth, stand up, sit down, keep moving…)

2) Going to the county library when we visited my grandparents in Florida, and checking out all of the Bernstein Bears books. And then finishing perhaps three of them — even at seven, my eyes were bigger than my, um, literary stomach. If you’ll accept that image.

3) Running up and down the long ramp to get to the children’s section.

4) Going home from the library and being caught in a huge rain storm. We went to the local community school and my mother banged on doors until a custodian came and gave us some garbage bags to wear the rest of the way home.

5) Winning a giant, bus-shelter sized poster for the Matilda movie in some sort of draw — it stood in the back of the closet for years before we finally got rid of it.

Most of all, I remember the way that the library — particularly the children’s section — used to look. Our local library recently underwent extensive renovations, and the children’s area that I remember has been more or less obliterated. And the new look is nice, I suppose … but it’s not what I grew up with, and doesn’t really stand the nostalgia test.

Ho hum.