Last time I checked out a library book, I had to find it with a card catalog. The library was so crammed with books that I could have taken three steps down an aisle, dropped dead, and not been found for weeks. I emerged from the dim, bulging stacks unscathed, signed a slip drawn from my book’s cover pocket, and walked out, unwitting that a childhood spent utterly in libraries or their product had just come to an end.
This story may be curious to — if anyone at all — those who happen to know that I have continued to read daily, sometimes a book a day. Those thousands of books have come from friends, or garage sales, or the Internet, but not from libraries, and rarely from bookstores, because — I kid you not (much) — about twenty years ago, bookstores and libraries started giving me panic attacks. Within a minute of passing through the gates, my heart would be pounding, my stomach queasy, my hands sweating… Perhaps, in these two decades of desperately trying to keep every opportunity from slipping through my fingers, a library crammed with floors of unread material was an unsubtle reminder that I could not, would not ever do it all.
But today I checked out a book. The Malibu public library is mostly computers, all in use, rows of homeless men, one who sang “Flashlight” the whole time I was there, his headphones trailing down to some unseen device or maybe not. Around them was a single, thin line of book racks. The jackets on the shelves were faded to green or blue. There were familiar names everywhere I looked, brittle and gray, like a trip to one’s preschool. My heart did not pound in this place; my stomach was not queasy. I stayed an hour before selecting a souvenir. A woman who might have been a librarian helped me check out, apparently misreading my surprise at the door computer; she cooed a little as she talked, as if trying to keep my spirits high in this brave first step I’d taken against whatever impediment that had prevented me from using the computers.
In the parking lot I put my shiny County of Los Angeles Public Library barcode tag on my key chain and considered my choice of book. It reminds me of books I’ve liked: written by a young man, because older men write about themselves, older women write about no one who ever lived, and young women write for someone, someone rarely me. The cover has scars in the correct places, probably inflicted by the very person thanked for their donation on the inside cover. I recognize the year of their gift: the year I ran out of schools to attend, the year I began to wonder, deep down, if all of life was a library. It took fourteen years to reach today and learn, if not the answer, then the rest of the question.