His Lifelong Passion Is One for the Books

“What are you doing up there, young man?”

Startled out of my reverie, I peered through the branches at the little white-haired woman on the ground below. “I--I was just thinking.”

“Come down here--now!”

She sounded formidable, despite her size, which turned out to be about the same as mine (I was age 11). But her eyes looked friendly, despite her blunt admonition: “Climbing trees on library property is strictly forbidden!”

She looked me up and down.

“What do you do when you’re not up a tree thinking?”

“Play with my dog, I guess.”

“Do you like to read?” she asked, to which I mumbled an awkward “Sometimes.” Nobody had ever asked me that.

“Then come with me,” she commanded, ushering an apprehensive young boy across the lawn and up a long flight of stairs into the town’s library.

My eyes widened. There were books everywhere! Row after row--with narrow pathways in between and light bulbs hanging out of the darkness above. More books than I’d ever seen before. More than I ever imagined could be in one place.

I stood transfixed.

She beckoned when I didn’t follow, then moved rapidly toward a large window with a table and chairs alongside.

“Here’s one of Terhune’s dog stories,” she announced in a firm whisper, handing me a book from a nearby stack.

Just then the noon whistle blew.

“Mother’s expecting me,” I began out loud.

“Whisper!” she commanded. “Always whisper when you’re in the library.”

“But I need to get home,” I whispered back.

“Then take it with you.”

“You mean I can?”

“Of course! Just put your name and address on this slip.”

*

So began the biggest adventure of my young life--discovering the world of books. I moved quickly through the Terhune shelf, plus a few other dog stories along the way, and I found one adventure series after another as I began to browse through early American frontier stories with New England settings. Then came prairie tales about Native Americans and buffalo hunts and the westward march of settlers--right through where I lived, I discovered with rising excitement.

All these and more I devoured that summer and the following school year, spending more and more time in the library rather than reading at home. It was always so quiet; that’s why we had to whisper, I’d learned. And besides, there was a special kind of book smell that made you want to read rather than talk.

The little librarian never said much after our first encounter. Not that she ignored me, for she and her assistant always smiled when I came in.

They liked having me there--I could tell--but they didn’t bother me with lots of questions, which I appreciated. Reading, I had discovered, was too important to be interrupted.

*

I never saw them again after that next spring, when suddenly my mother was taken ill and my father drove me out West to live with an uncle while he closed up the house. But it didn’t take me long to find people just like those two librarians.

Even the library looked and felt like the one I was used to; it had the same book smell. With so many of my old friends there on the shelves, I began to feel right at home. Good for a lost and lonesome boy.

Today as I browse shelves and get an occasional whiff of that special smell, I pause to remember the little white-haired librarian who called me down out of that tree. And I feel grateful.