Library

Weird isn't it? I don't go to libraries much. It seems like about the only time I go there is to show up for my critiquing sessions with my fellow critiquers. I don't usually check out books --- at least, not at the library. Occasionally, I'll help Shelley download an audio book to listen to, but I don't even usually listen to it myself.

Shelley goes. She goes all of the time. Takes a bag; fills it up; brings it home. Chooses a few of the books to look at, reads some. Pretty soon she says it's time to go to the library again to check the old ones in and some new ones out.

As I think about that notion --- me not going to the library or checking books out there --- I feel a little ashamed. It's as if I don't wanna put such information out here for all the world to see. Here I am, professing to be a writer, and I don't go to library and I don't check out books. Weird, huh?

I remember going to the Clearfield library when I was a boy. I don't know who I was there with. It doesn't seem like my parents would have taken me there. I don't recall them ever going there, having library cards, or whatever you needed back then to check things out. It's possible I was there with a friend or with my sister. However, I doubt my sister ever checkd anything out from the library either.

I had a friend named Tom --- well, I still consider him a friend --- whose mother worked at the library for a while --- at least, I think she did. I doubt, however, him having a mother who worked there had any connection to my memory of being there, but perhaps.

But I read. I would say, relative to the general population, I read a lot. What I read, however, is usually something we've purchased over the years. Sometimes, I'll pick up a library book Shelley has brought home, and I'll read that. For example, I'm reading Once Was Lost by Sara Zarr. Come to think of it, though, I actually went to the library with Shelley that day, and I picked that book out. She read it, liked it, and I decided I better read it.

In fact, I ought to decide to make going to the library and picking out books to read more of a habit. It's not a bad idea.