Library Memories

The pictures are gentrified, a warning that what was is usually not what is. Nevertheless, sometimes, like an archeologist, your mind’s eye can recapture shadows of what was. I think gentrification is attractive to those who didn’t grow up in an area, but to those who did it can be bittersweet or downright repulsive. Memories can be like comfort food; while visits to the actual places from whence memories flow can be like coming home only to find your family doesn’t live there anymore.

I post the pictures of my childhood library – but the memories are better.

It was place in a quiet neighborhood under a canopy of majestic old trees, with trunks as grand as the Empire State Building and with roots broad and twisting like a Los Angeles expressway with multiple cloverleafs. I used to bring my toy cars and use those roots for highways so I know whereof I speak.

And just as a Fifth Avenue high-rise, those trees had their tenants – squirrels, scurrying up and down trunks and limbs and from branch to branch; you might think they were related to the bee family and that ensconced in one of those palatial trees there lived Her Royal Highness, The Queen of Squirrels, served by these her frenzied vassals.

It was a place of tranquility. Not just inside the library, but outside as well. It was as if there was always snow on the ground in the woodland with a hush and stillness, why even the squirrels moved with a lightness so as not to disturb the peace. Their mothers no doubt instructed them that they lived in Libraryland and must therefore be good and quiet little squirrels. No doubt the creatures could read; entering the library at night for bedtime stories.

From the pictures perhaps some (most?) of the grand old trees are no more – Ents no longer, alas Mr. Tolkien.

The Noyes Library in Kensington, MD. was my first library and my first love. Going to the library was like going to church, it was a place of reverence, for my mother taught me to reverence and honor books, and history, and learning. In comparison to church the library was much to be preferred, not that I was opposed to church, it’s just that I couldn’t take church home and cuddle up with it, but I could do that with a book. I could go places with a book, I could travel in time and space and experience history and people and adventure – with church, well, what can you really say about Jesus on a Flannel-Graph? Kind of weak isn’t it?

The floorboards of the library were old, much like the floor boards of the Kensington General Store. Old, and wise, and welcoming were those floorboards. They were grandfather and grandmother floorboards, not linoleum or tile or carpet – good old wood from a good old time when the men who installed them were more concerned about workmanship than glitz and glitter.

Perhaps the library represented a respite from the uncertainties of home life? Perhaps it represented security? Maybe it was an escape into a realm where the only limits were my vocabulary and imagination and comprehension? Whatever it was, it was a place I retire to now and again, beneath those grand old trees in that quiet neighborhood, among the squirrels, and within the sheltering confines of my first and best-loved library – Noyes Library of Kensington, MD.