Library Day

Once a week during reading class at Washington Grade School, our teacher would take us across the street to the Oglesby Public Library.

 

The library was on the second floor of City Hall, above the police station—a small Midwestern arrangement that somehow made perfect sense. Justice downstairs. Imagination upstairs.

 

We would file out the side doors of the school, the ones facing east, and walk across the street in a loose line of children. I can still see it clearly: the sidewalk warm under the sun, the traffic passing slowly, our teacher reminding us—already—to be quiet.

 

Inside the building, we climbed a narrow wooden staircase that creaked beneath our shoes. 

And then the door would open.

 

The first thing that greeted you was the smell.

 

Anyone who grew up around libraries knows it. That deep, sweet fragrance of old paper and binding glue, leather covers, or thick cardboard covers. It was the smell of time itself. Books that had been opened and read for years before I arrived there—perhaps before I was even born. Perhaps before my parents were.

 

The children’s section was to the right.

 

Before I discovered the writers who would later capture my imagination—H. G. Wells, Jules Verne, Mark Twain, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Daniel Defoe, Charles Dickens, Edgar Allan Poe—I spent hours reading biographies. I remember James Whitcomb Riley, George Washington Carver, and John Quincy Adams. For some reason, these have stayed with me all these years.

 

Lives unfolding quietly on the page.

 

Even then, something about that fascinated me. The idea that a book could open a door into another person’s world. Another century. Another mind.

 

I didn’t think of it that way at the time, of course.

 

I just loved reading.

 

The quiet thrill of pulling a book from the shelf and wondering what waited inside it.

 

Looking back now, that small library across the street from Washington Grade School was the first place outside of home, school, or church where I found refuge. A place where the world felt larger than the streets of Oglesby.

 

Libraries do something mysterious to children.

 

They plant seeds without announcing it.

 

You wander in simply looking for a story, and somewhere along the way, you begin to understand that books are more than stories. They are voices speaking across time.

 

Years later, I would travel far from that small Illinois town—to other cities, other countries, even other languages. But the path probably began on those quiet afternoons, climbing the wooden stairs above the police station.

 

A boy crossing the street for library day.

 

Not yet knowing that the world he was stepping into would be much larger than the one he had just left behind.