Barbara Emodi's Blog: Barbara Emodi reads - Posts Tagged "public-libraries"

I grew up in a small town in the Canadian prairies, Brandon, Manitoba, "the wheat city". It wasn't a particularly exotic place to be a child but it had the most wonderful library. Downtown in an old bank building on the route of the number 10 bus. Children were allowed to travel by themselves in those days and every Saturday morning I did.

That library had the most wonderful collection, heavily subsidized by the kind of readers only eight months of the year of harsh weather can create.

Downstairs, was the children's department, a concrete bunker painted red enamel with the bank's old monolithic safe, kept locked, in the corner. By age eight-years-old I'd read all there was in that basement, so after a meeting of several librarians it was decided that I could be given an adult lending card and allowed upstairs.

That one decision changed my life, made me who I am right now. No doubt about it. Upstairs I discovered the Dewey Decimal system's 600s (technology- medicine right through agriculture to building construction) and the 700s, Arts and Recreation.

I read it all.

Any title that began "So you want to be a (fill in bee-keeper, portrait painter, textile designer, home fermenter, boat builder) I borrowed. I learned then that I could be whoever or whatever I wanted, all I had to do, was I read the book.

I also read literature, fiction. Some of it was written for "young people," books where the world had trees, streams, and forests, not just one big sky and rows of combines cutting the hay. I also read books, uncensored, for adults. The "Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam", Kahil Gibran, Tolstoy and Tennessee Williams.

But then when I was fifteen, we moved. Out of the prairies to Montreal. From a place where I read about the world, to a place that was in it.

But not to a better library.

Before we left, I went down to the reference desk to return my last load of books and say good bye. The librarian on duty took my card one last time, and scratched out the expiry date and wrote over it, "good for a lifetime."

And it was.