Love and Healing in the Stacks
Suzanne RiveccaJul 15, 2010
A new author shares what the library has meant to her.
Were it not for a library-namely, the public library of Utica, NY, a five-story brick and limestone box of neoclassical grandeur-I would not have been born. My parents met there in 1963. My mother was a 17-year-old high school senior with an after-school job as a page in the library where my father, in his junior year of college, came regularly to study. They had grown up in separate ethnic enclaves of the same town-my father in Italian American East Utica, my mother in the Irish neighborhood of Corn Hill-and had never crossed paths until the day my dad, on the verge of leaving college and joining the priesthood, looked up from his studies, caught a glimpse of a radiant-faced, black-haired girl shelving books, and instantly knew that a life of cloistered chastity was not in the cards.
He didn't know her name. It took him a while to gather the nerve to ask her out. At home, he talked at such length about the beautiful girl in the library that my grandmother, who had never seen her son so love struck, insisted on accompanying him on one of his daily pilgrimages so he could point out the object of his affection. And so-in a tableau that has been described to me since childhood, with equal parts hilarity and pathos, by the parties involved-my dad and his mother sat at a reading table, with a pile of books as camouflage, and gawked as discreetly as possible at the woman he was destined to marry.
"Which one is she?" my grandma kept asking.
"Don't look!" he would urgently whisper in response.
"Well, I can't tell which one she is if you don't point her out!"
My mother, for her part, resorted to equally subtle machinations. These included approaching my father's table and helpfully offering to open the window for him in the dead of winter, and-according to her own mom-"accidentally" dropping a book on his foot. Eventually, however, these two shy and book-loving people managed to find the words-a few words, just a fraction of the millions, printed and bound, that surrounded them-to talk to each other. They went on a date, got engaged, got married, and had two daughters, the younger of whom-me-followed in their shy and book-loving footsteps to the point of becoming a writer herself. And as far back as I can remember, libraries have been the unfailing havens of my world, facilitating the refuge I have always found in words, padding the edges of life with a rich, sustaining, rustly quiet, a resonant and sacred pause.
My mom spent her entire career in libraries. Libraries in two states and three cities. She worked in a big university library where she loved to roam the stacks, basking in the hallowed, sepia hush. She worked at a tiny branch library in a rural township. And this spring, she'll retire after 20 years at the public library of the waterfront village of Spring Lake, MI, where she started as a checkout clerk and was promoted to youth services librarian. She weathered the transition from card catalogs to online records. She planned thousands of Storytime sessions, oversaw hundreds of Summer Reading Challenges, read countless babies and toddlers to sleep, and got countless schoolchildren excited about and engaged in reading. But her relationship with libraries really began when she was a child and her father, a postal worker entrusted with the task of picking out books for the rest of the family, took her on regular excursions to the very library where she would one day meet her future husband.
My mother has told me that she has always felt at home in libraries, and like her father before her, she passed on that sense of belonging to me. When my sister and I were little, she often took us to the public library in Kalamazoo, MI, which shared a building with the Kalamazoo Public Museum. My earliest memories of picking out books, therefore, are intertwined with intriguing, spectral snippets of natural history exhibits: Egyptian mummies buried with the wizened, licorice-black bodies of their cats, dim, glassed-in tableaux of American Indians and shaggy taxidermied buffalo, eerie sarcophagi, and a gift shop where I recall greatly coveting a plastic figurine of a black-dappled Appaloosa horse. I remember crossing over from the bright, papery quiet of the children's section of the library, the satisfying crackle of its plastic-sleeved picture books, its child-sized tables and primary-colored rugs, into the museum, which was a different kind of quiet: darker, murkier, cooler, its wood dark-grained instead of honeyed, its very air textured with ghostly knowledge, like church. From then on, libraries always held an undercurrent of mystique for me, as if any given shelf might reveal a portal to ancient and cave-like environs.
In actuality, libraries have given me a kind of portal: one to imagination, of course, but also to healing. When I was 19, a serious bout of depression caused me to drop out of college and move back home. None of the settings I found myself in-my old bedroom with its accusing intimations of lost adolescent ambition, my family's living room, where I sat all night, unable to sleep or read, and watched rerun after rerun-felt conducive to putting my life back together. When my mother left for work in the mornings, I started going with her to the library. I would browse the stacks, pick out a stack of books, curl up in an old armchair, and read for hours as she worked. It was there, in that muted but quietly industrious refuge, that I began to slowly lay the groundwork of rediscovering my curiosity, my engagement, my faith in the lifesaving power of words. Whether good or bad, the words I read then, like the earliest sentences I read in childhood, sunk into my brain, indelible and verbatim. My appetite for words, as it was when I was a child, became omnivorous and undiscriminating: I read anything, and I unconsciously memorized incongruous and disparate bits of language and description that will never leave me.
I vividly recall, for instance, certain phrases from a 1960s childrearing guide I plucked off the shelves of my mom's library: a book I read simply because it was full of words and because its long strings of black type were like a rope I climbed, hand over hand, back to lucidity and reason. I remember that two children spoke to me in the library one day, and I was moved by how effortlessly I was able to respond to them and how their mother regarded me with glancing approval. I felt somehow rejoined to the world of other people, or at least fluent in its language. I began to write again. The next fall I reenrolled in school and rededicated myself to writing with a singular sense of purpose, setting myself on the path that would eventually lead to publishing a book.
I have come to believe that libraries and the words they contain are in my blood, and in romantic moods I imagine the chain of libraries, like a procession of elephants linked by trunk and tail, that created a path to my eventual existence and choice of career. If my grandfather hadn't been such an inveterate reader and library patron, would my mother have ended up working in the library where they'd spent so many hours together? If my father had never seen her in this setting-the burnished light, the marble fireplace and pillars of the reading room, the delicate reverence with which she, earnest and serene as some mythical acolyte, put the books where they belonged-how would he have viscerally known, as he did, that he would marry her? If libraries hadn't been such a daily facet of my life since childhood, would I have absorbed so many millions of words, and cultivated the desire to write books of my own?
Everyone in my immediate family owes their livelihood to words. My mother has made her living as a conduit to the world of reading. My father, a sales rep with a background in laboratory research, uses his words to illuminate, describe, and parse scientific phenomena in ways that profoundly affect illness and health. My older sister is an advocate for social justice on behalf of homeless and poor people. Her words-spoken out loud, boldly, to politicians and lawmakers and police-are a call to action, mobilizing the powerless and discomfiting the complacent.
As for me, my purpose is less direct, simultaneously more naïve and more grandiose than my family members'. I want to create a language for what is unsayable, and I want to do it with an urgency I have never been able to stem or deny. In short, I want to create what does not yet exist in any book in any library in the world, and I want the world, with all its libraries and books, to need me to do this. It's a lot to ask: to deserve a place on the shelf. To be the book that is pulled off, the sentence that sinks in, the word that strikes a sweet chime of recognition in some stranger's mind. To imagine this happening is even more audacious than to dream of love at first sight among the stacks.
Every Christmas, my family has a laugh at the scene in Capra's It's a Wonderful Life when George Bailey makes the horrifying discovery that, in the dissipated parallel universe of a George-less Bedford Falls, his wife, Mary, is a reclusive spinster librarian. "Where's Mary?" he frantically asks a man on the street, who replies, in a tone of awed, shuddering doom underscored by ominous music, "She's-closing...up...the library!" At this point my family erupts into mock gasps of horror as Mary, whose unhealthy devotion to the printed word has apparently made her nearsighted, appears in horn-rimmed glasses and clothes of orphanage-matron severity and dowdiness, her face and personality irretrievably warped from having wasted her childbearing years among the stacks. She screams and runs from her would-be husband, and the townspeople set upon him as he chases her through the snow.
One of the reasons we laugh so hard is because this scenario is the inverse of my parents' experience: their love story that began in a library, a romance incubated in brooding, word-dense silence, passions unspoken but deeply inscribed. The unhappy parallel universe of my family, therefore, would be a world in which the library had never been born. A world in which a green-eyed, curly-haired girl and a handsome young man of monastic studiousness never saw one another in a room full of books, volumes upon volumes waiting to hatch their secrets like brooding hens. A world in which secrets were not passed on and words remained unwritten, and where so much would never be born.
