“Remoted - Hybrid” – Day 549 (Thursday)

The library of my youth was a magical place. The books beckoned. The reference section was stocked with knowledge not available at home. The temperature was always comfortable, especially in the hot summers when the window fans at home just rearranged the heat.

When I was nine or ten, and maybe even younger, I would walk from home to the library. In those wild and reckless days, kids wandered the streets freely and I went there by myself. According to the modern magic of the Internet and Google search, the distance was a half-mile from our house. I had no clue how far it was. What was important was knowing where it was and how to get there. 

The Fitchburg Public Library
has a beautiful outdoor area.

I loved the library.  It was a huge sense of freedom to go to the library, browse the stacks in the glorious hush of the place, and choose books to come home with me. It was my refuge during an awkward youth and adolescence. It was an escape from a neighborhood full of bratty boys and no girls my age. It had  comfortable climate controlled conditions where I could attack my goal of reading every book in the children’s library (I failed, they kept getting more books). There was a garden at the library, but I always spent my time inside with the book stacks.

It sat on Main Street, and at the opposite end of the side street facing it sat the high school. When my family moved across town when I was in fifth grade, the distance to the library became a smidge longer, but was still under a mile.

In high school, that same library was the site of after school visits for researching term papers, doing homework, and the occasional date with a boy from Saint Bernard’s High School. Years later, kids would hang out at the mall, but for me in my teenage years, it was the library. It was entertainment. I would pull open random drawers and start browsing the entries. I loved the heft of the long drawers and the soft edges of the older catalogue cards and the crisp edges of the new cards. Sometimes I imagined how amazing it would be to work there and be able to go downstairs to the staff only area.

At Fitchburg State, despite options like the commuter cafeteria, the student union lounge, and the quad, I hung out in the library between classes. The first floor was for people watching and talking, and the upper floors were for hard core studying. There was a small group of us who had all attended Fitchburg High and we met on the first floor in our free time.

Since the Internet arrived, countless hours have been spent randomly typing in key words and reading through the search results. The digital card catalogue is vast, but there are no physical cards to flip through. My earliest online shopping was for books. Amazon held some of the excitement of the library, minus the immediacy of leaving with a no-cost book in hand, due back in a few weeks.