Breaking an Addiction

 

Two institutions that completely surrendered to FEAR and PANIC over the past year are the churches and the libraries. I’ll save the churches for another post, if I’m so motivated to overcome my utter disgust, but I’d like to take special note of the library panic since Covid.

It helped me break a serious addiction.

For the past, oh, three decades or so, I’ve let an addiction fester. It started slow, perhaps a fraction of what it was at its worst, but then grew, and grew some more, exponentially almost, absorbing my free time and eventually impinging on my obligations.

What am I talking about?

My ever-present, ever-growing, growling, incessant search for the Perfect Book.

It didn’t matter what my current interest was. Catholicism. World War II. String Theory. Therevadan Buddhism. General George McClellan. Number Theory. It didn’t matter. All I knew – I knew! – was that somewhere, in some library in my county, in one of those 88 linked libraries, was the Perfect Book.

So every Saturday morning, with the girls in tow, we’d hit a different library from an ever-widening circumference of libraries my habit familiarized itself with. And the special Saturday where we’d visit a NEW library. Oh, the Perfect Books to be found there!

Then it became a weeknight thing. Sometimes, if I ran across something at work that piqued the interest buds, I’d go on the county library collective website and survey a collection of tomes on said topic. Eventually I’d select a library, preferably one on the way home but not necessarily so, and stop in and make my steal and gleefully thumb through the book(s) when stopped at traffic lights.

It got to the point where I probably borrowed 300 or more books a year.

At my best, I only read 10 or 15 borrowed books cover-to-cover annually. That means I’m spending my waking hours thumbing through the indices of 290 or more books a year! I could waste a good two or three hours skimming chapters, tables of contents, and pictorial credits on one book alone!

Then, mid-March of 2020, Covid descended, with unbridled fear and panic in its wake.

The libraries shut down.

Shut down.

And I was forced to go cold turkey.

Fortunately, I also buy books. I generally have a 30-40 book backlog – the “On Deck” circle as I like to call it in these electronic pages. So I began making inroads into those interesting books I had but never had the chance to read ’cuz of all that thumbing through nonsense.

I even bought about twenty books in the past year – six of which were actually brand new!

The result is I haven’t read a library book in twelve months.

Now, the libraries partially re-opened a few months back. But when I entered one, I lost any respect I had for the institution. I’ve been patronizing libraries for almost 50 years, my mother was a librarian and I spent plenty of idle hours in one as a youth, and I even worked in one at college. But after what I saw, I swore off libraries forever.

Entering one you’d think you were in a post-Apocalyptic CDC lab during a bubonic plague breach. Police tape. Angry magic marker scrawls on white boards commanding one on the do’s and don’ts. Traffic cones preventing entrance into rest rooms. One library had a strict call-in-advance policy where they’d pick the item off the shelf for you and have it waiting in the foyer – no browsing allowed! Several have “quarantine shelving” for Returns. Another made me check out my daughter’s books – by angling the books to a scanner underneath a Plexiglas screen.

“You all must be terribly frightened,” I said to one librarian, in a moment of frustration and disbelief.

“We have a lot of seniors come here.”

Really? I thought, glancing about the abandoned wasteland of chairs stacked upon tables – NO SITTING! – and mobile shelving blocking off hallways. Really? I can’t recall the last time I saw a senior at a library, and if I was in a high-risk group I wouldn’t go to a library in the first place.

But I’m not bitter.

In fact, I’m grateful.

I’ve gained back control of my focus, and that is a gift beyond measure.