Oh To Be A Librarian
There was a library housed in an old Victorian home in one of the many towns I grew up in. The memory is so faint now that I couldn’t tell you which town it was in. It hovers at the edge of conscious memory—half truth, half dream.
There was a garden filled with daisies and zinnias leading up to the wrap-around porch, and the door was one of those heavy wooden ones with waffling glass panes in the top. Inside, there were shelves and shelves of books from floor to ceiling, not a single wall was spared. If you turned to the right, sunlight poured through a row of high windows and landed squarely on the librarian’s desk. In the center of the room, someone had installed a spiral iron staircase, the winding steps transformed into shelves, each filled with books. Near the desk, a community bulletin board brimmed with announcements, and in the middle was the most important one: the summer reading challenge. Twenty-five books, and your name went up on the board.
I signed up, of course, and devoured book after book all summer long. That was the summer I read Black Beauty and Flowers in the Attic. I reached the twenty five book challenge and then some, often while curled up in a chair in that same library. In my memory, the Victorian library was always empty and quiet. When I return there in my mind, I feel proud, safe, and content, bathed in beams of light with the bulletin board standing like a prize wall.
These days, I find myself in libraries often, donating my book, my words, to the shelves that once sustained me. Every time I do, something stirs—a complicated mix of gratitude and disbelief. I feel like a child again. I feel like shouting to the world: I have a book in the library. Me. The kid who once survived on stories and hid among stacks of books. The kid who clung to words like lifelines and lived a thousand adventures in her mind. The urge to run my hand across the spines and whisper, I get to be here too, is almost overwhelming. I feel insignificant, yes, but also full of wonder. Libraries are alive with whispers, brimming with stories, packed wall to wall with the unyielding human need to memorialize our thoughts, our existence.
If you read this far, perhaps you think I’m a little crazy (I am). But I’m writing this to you because I had to laugh at myself this week. I went to the library to work on my next book in a silent space. My local library is not Victorian—it is modern and practical, with a teen center and a children’s area. It has a long table full of computers and multiple information stations. Yet, as I walked in, I felt the same old magic rising in me. Extraordinary things happen in libraries.
Except my public library isn’t actually set up to be “quiet” anymore. I settled into the far back corner of the building, near the big picture windows. Behind me, two women conducted a parent-teacher conference. A group of teenagers rummaged loudly through magazines. Children in the kids’ section were screaming (that is not an exaggeration)—one of them was in the middle of a full tantrum.
I want to be honest here. I felt like a librarian (from 1982). And not the “sexy she just needs to take off her glasses and wow” kind, but the “stern, aging matriarch with the gray bun and reading glasses” kind. I wanted to shush everybody. But I’ve been working on that part of me so instead I kept typing away, letting the environment whirl and fade around me.
Then the oddest thing happened. Above the tantrum, I also heard laughter—children’s laughter. The teenagers weren’t just being noisy; they were connecting, finding joy in each other. I realized the parent-teacher conference was about helping an underserved child. The many librarians were bustling about aiding everything from story-time to computer searches. My modern, present-day library was vibrating with community. I chastised the grey-haired librarian in me.
Some days I wish I could find that reverent, silent Victorian library again, slip through the wooden door, sit in the beam of light, and read until the world disappeared. I wish success could still be measured in names tacked proudly to a bulletin board: You did it—you finished.
But the truth is, I’m certain I’m remembering it wrong. Time has softened the edges, exaggerated the beauty. What remains isn’t the actual library, but the way it made me feel—like I could do anything, be anything. And maybe that’s the point. The magic of who we once were doesn’t die. Sometimes we just forget it. Sometimes we allow the wonder of our younger, curious selves to fade into memory. And maybe that “stern, shushing librarian” in us isn’t really shushing the noise at all—maybe she’s frustrated because she misses an old magic.
My current library is louder than I’d like, but it’s alive with connection. It’s a hub for community, a resource for those who need it, a safe space where children grow and learn. Things change, and part of us longs to cling to what was. But the magic we miss isn’t something we can touch or revisit. It’s not an old Victorian building. It lives inside us, waiting to be remembered, reminding us that wonder never really goes away—it just takes new forms.
What about you—what library memory still lives in you?
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