This is where I met Babar and Gus and Charlotte who was friends with a pig and taught us both Life Goes On even through tears. I watched my mom carry her weight in books to the librarian-lady paid to look mean but she was actually nice as she took pictures of punchcards and told me I would have such fun where I was going. We were poor though I didn’t know it as I poured over a Big Book of Ships and I listened to Drums that I hated hated hated but I loved the way my grandma read so I pretended (I think she knew). Later I'd walk to that funky stoned (literally) building on my own, corner of Vanowen and Vanalden. There I solved cases with Encyclopedia Brown and found a book called The Battle of Midway that taught me sometimes a war comes down to 28.2072° N, 177.3735° W. Gray's Anatomy — wow! How did they draw that well, and is that what I look like inside? Where the Red Fern Grows because, you know, dogs — and to make myself feel better I picked up The Red Pony. Mistake. Except tears and truth often go together. Steinbeck became my god before I met Corrie ten Boom in her hiding place and Siddhartha Hesse kept asking me questions until I found out why a caged bird sings and that wars are going on always, sometimes in the bedroom, sometimes far from streets. Angelou Birdsong led to Beloved Morrison and Purple Walker, and I saw with new eyes a way: war is going on always, always, but to speak is to fight. Never stop fighting. Never. Stop. Fighting. Still later I met Monette and found his half-life beautiful — maybe mine would be, too. I put Melville back on the shelf 55 times before I finally breached its first great wave and then thought: was Hawthorne his Moby Dick? Poor guy — Hawthorne was a crank but damn if his letters weren't good. Woolf my Patron Saint showed me her room so that I could want mine. Tan and Yen Mah who made my mom cry because they knew, they knew — “we carry our stories” — it wasn’t easy, not easy at all. She loved those books. All this and more in a library, from my little corner one (when LA had only one area code) to the Library of Congress, a pilgrimage. Memories of mom dragging me by the hand until, later, I was pushing her chair to the books. All these people, all these ghosts dancing and sobbing and waiting on shelves, waiting to be held or thrown, doesn’t matter. Life buoyed by imagination, imagination buoyed by life. Freedom. Adventure. Suffering. America. So of course: Arizona Georgia Illinois Louisiana Mississippi Missouri Montana Pennsylvania South Carolina South Dakota Texas Wyoming let's close the libraries. We wouldn’t want anybody learnin' nothin' new…
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“This effort to change what libraries are, or even just take libraries away from communities, I think, is part of a larger effort to diminish the public good, to take away those information resources from individuals and really limit their opportunity to have the kinds of resources that a community hub, like a public library, provides.”
— Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of the American Library Association’s Office of Intellectual Freedom.
G Beckman 