My favorite childhood place

While I was at the public library over the weekend, I found myself having to roam the racks of children’s books when I was looking for the first book in the Spiderwick Chronicles series (which was extremely good, by the way).

I can’t begin to explain the sense of nostalgia that filled me when I saw the familiar bindings and smell of the books.  When I was a young child, my favorite place in my elementary school was the library.  I would have lived in there if that had been an option.  I remember standing in that room with the dark brown carpet and looking up at the shelves stretching out before me.  I remember that sense of having an infinite number of worlds at my fingertips, ready for me to just reach out and take them.  There was so much to learn and discover contained in those pages.

I remember hearing the librarian read aloud ghost stories to my class and her letting me hang out in the library after school while I waited for my ride home.  I remember doing research for reports on everything from parrots to Israel.  I remember reading a biography of Thomas Alva Edison and still remember how he attributed his deafness to an incident with a train conductor.   I remember discovering the worlds of Where the Sidewalk Ends and Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights.  I remember reading Grimm’s fairy tales and scary stories about girls whose heads would fall off if you removed the ribbon from around their necks.

Sadly, my old elementary school is now a church, but I sometimes wonder if those walls are still lined with books, perhaps of another genre, but still bringing wonder to people of all ages.  It’s probably somebody’s office or meeting room now.  Even if it is no longer a library, that room fostered a love of reading and books that I’ve carried with me from birth to the present, and I’m sure well on into the future.

I think I still feel at least a bit of that childhood wonder every time I come face-to-face with a new book.