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Public Library

Posted by Mark | Filed under Life

When I was in ele­men­tary school; I used to get in trou­ble for talk­ing to the other kids dur­ing class. Even­tu­ally, this got bad enough that the teacher called my Mom in for a parent-teacher con­fer­ence to dis­cuss the problem…

Teacher: Mark keeps talk­ing dur­ing class and it’s very dis­rup­tive.
Mom: When is he doing all this talk­ing?
Teacher: After he fin­ishes his assign­ment.
Mom: Did you give him some­thing to read?
Teacher: Yes, but he fin­ished that book.
Mom: Did you try giv­ing him another one?
Teacher: Yes, but he fin­ished that one too.
Mom: *glare*
Teacher: In fact, he’s already read all the books in the room.
Mom: Why don’t you get him another one from the library then?
Teacher: I did but he fin­ished it already.
Mom: *glare* Then why don’t you let him go to the library and get another one?
Teacher: Wha.… I can’t do that!?! He could get into all sorts of trou­ble walk­ing down the hall­way.
Mom: *glare* If you let him go to the library; he’ll stop talk­ing in class.

Even­tu­ally, I was allowed to walk those halls, wan­der the shelves of the library and seek out new books to read. As Mom pre­dicted, once I had some­thing to read; I was quiet in class. This is a habit that has stuck with me over the years and I ended up spend­ing much of my youth in school & pub­lic libraries. I bring this up today because for the first time in a long time; I went down to CPL and checked out some books. This sud­den trip to my local pub­lic library was prompted by their adver­tis­ing of an adult sum­mer read­ing pro­gram. The basic idea is you have to read 6 books, turn in a log and then you’ll be entered to win a gift cer­tifi­cate to a book store. I never could turn down free books; so I decided to go sign up².

As I wan­dered around the library look­ing for some books to read; I felt a sense of nos­tal­gia and loss. There were entire sum­mers in my youth were I barely went any­where else besides the library. These days, the rar­ity is when I do go. I miss those fabled days of yes­ter­year when life was sim­ple and I could relax with a book in my hand all sum­mer long. *sigh*

So why haven’t I been going? Partly because I’m an ornery cuss who doesn’t like hav­ing to wait and if the library doesn’t have the next book in a series I’m read­ing; it irks me. Partly because I can afford to buy more books for myself than I could when I was younger. Hav­ing my own copy of a book means I can read it when­ever I like 24/7/365³ and the copy of the book I’m read­ing is likely to be in bet­ter con­di­tion (plus it’ll stay that way). *shrug* Not sure what else I have to say, except that I hope to be mak­ing vis­its to my pub­lic library more often. It’ll let me relive parts of my past (and beat some of this sum­mer heat).

¹ For some rea­son, employ­ers don’t like it when you read books all day instead of test­ing their soft­ware.
² Besides, money has been a bit tighter of late and bor­row­ing books from the library is cheap enter­tain­ment. :D
³ 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year (366 in a leap year).

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