In the archeology of my memories

The library had that unique papery scent found nowhere else, permeating the air around me. Then, when I was found, I was usually on a carpeted floor somewhere, cocooned within a pile of just-found books and their treasures within. Though unaware what the word serendipity meant then,  I am sure that pile included books I didn’t know I was looking for. It was as if they had found me.

And like some distant shore in a sea of memory, I recall, too, this library had a metal stairway that I climbed to the second floor. The stairway was near windows that overlooked downtown San Mateo. The sunlight flooded in and onto the nearby books. I can still remember that if you reached out to the spines of these particular books they felt warm to the touch.

One of my favorite books then was “The Yearling” by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, about a boy and an orphaned fawn he adopts. And though I’m about as unlikely a person to adopt a deer as anyone I know, this novel has always nested in my imagination. Books we love can often exist in this timeless land, and even today, if I happen to be in a library in another city I will sometimes wend my way to the fiction section to find “The Yearling.” I’ll read its last several pages and I’ll fall out of time, with no years separating the boy I once was and the older man I have since become.  

What I didn’t know sitting on that floor as a boy, is that a public library  — its books, its computers, its lecture series, its English learners classes, its Maker Labs — is a creation that protects and passes along our shared and evolving knowledge. Existing for more than 5,000 years since the time of Mesopotamian clay tablets, a library is a community’s essential public service, for it exists as a democratic cornerstone that espouses our highest ideals: our openness, our pluralism, our empathy. Everyone who walks through its doors is treated equally, as someone who is a seeker of knowledge. Enter as the person you are and the library will shelter you: no one’s life is evicted.

“The America I love still exists,” wrote the novelist Kurt Vonnegut. “Not in the White House or Supreme Court or Senate or the House of Representatives. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.”

Now, in this later era of my life, the library has become more to me.

Retirement, it has been said, can be like going through a door to an empty room that one has to furnish and decorate, with only yourself to judge how well you do.

These days, I spend hours each week with other folks whose childhoods were left behind decades ago. Our lives were once spent teaching and starting companies, raising children and defending clients in court. Now we volunteer our time, tucked away downstairs at the Burlingame Library in a windowless room that most of the library patrons never see.  

It’s here where the thousands of books donated to help support the library are collected, sorted, and priced for their sale in the library’s bookstore or online or at the book sales the Library Foundation holds.  

Often, tending to a stack of books awaiting my attention, I wonder how I found myself here, in my later-in-life years, with these others who have come from far and wide, to do our part in keeping alive this glorious creation that’s existed for 5,000 years.

And then, faintly, I hear the high, melodic voice of a librarian, and hear, too, the excited voices of children. It’s story time down the hallway from where we work. And, listening to this, I recall the library of my own childhood and its metal stairway leading upward to the endless shelves of books calling out to me.

And faintly once more — for it will be in a future I cannot possibly know — I try to imagine these children’s distant, adult recollections about when they, too, discovered this distinct home for freedom and awakening, this vital and indispensible place we call a public library.

Mike Nagler taught for many years at Cañada College and was a member of the Burlingame Library Board and Foundation.