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.
