0606blog
Get Me My Books
Have you ever felt like you’re sitting on a powder keg, walking on thin ice or any of a thousand other cliches that portend bad things, I have and I do. There are warnings of an imminent, really bad hurricane season, reports of a dangerous vaccine-resistant, COVID-19 variant, surging glaciers, a federal judge’s ruling reversing a ban on owning assault weapons in California and resurgence of ABBA, well not really, but that would be worse than all the other bad things rolled into one.
That’s not to say there aren’t good things happening but they aren’t enough to wet that smoldering power keg so I will instead get my beach chair, my shades, my book and my ear buds and leave this earthly realm for a while. Which reminds me of visits to the library when I was a boy, it was in a small, converted home on Spring Valley Road and there were at least a billion books or so it seemed to a little guy who was taking in any new information like a sponge and especially about dinosaurs.
I would often leave with a dozen books balanced under my small arms, related to a range of fascinating subjects, starting with dinosaurs, of which I was especially inured with tyrannosaurus rex because he was the baddest of them all, as far as I know; books about rocks; and then there were always one or two books on baseball, including a biography of one of my heroes, like Mickey Mantle and another instructional book on the intricacies of hitting, which never helped me one bit or even one hit.
Finding a book was a challenge, there were no computers to simply type in a title and within a moment find all books related to the title at the local library as well as at any of the other libraries in the county or even the state or even the nation.
If you wanted to find a book, there was a big wooden cabinet with dozens of narrow drawers that contained little cardboard cards listing all of the library’s books, categorized according to the Dewey Decimal System, which was created in 1876 by Melville Louis Kossuth “Melvil” Dewey, an American librarian and educator and founder of the American Library Association, although he resigned in 1905 amid allegations of sexual harassment, racism and anti-Semitism. Dewey also founded the Lake Placid Club, which barred membership from Jews and any people of color. As a result of his sordid history, in January 2020, the American Library Association removed Dewey’s name from its top honor, changing it from the Melvil Dewey Medal to the ALA Medal of Excellence. Of course I didn’t know about any of this because at the time my main interests were tyrannosaurus rex, rocks and Mickey Mantle.
People trusted each other more back then than they do today, either that or they just used the technology at hand to catch scofflaws, which included a hand stamp that the library clerk used to stamp the due date on the library card which was tucked in an envelope glued to the inside cover of the book. I liked to see how many people had checked out the same books as I did because then I knew how popular the subject was. It would have been simple to get my own hand stamp and change the due dates because nobody ever checked if a book was overdue until you returned it. It never occurred to me and instead, I often returned books late and paid the required fine of 10-cents a day. Of course, the fines mounted for those books that somehow found their way under my bed and were literally months overdue.
Browsing the stacks in the library was always like walking through a portal into another place, kind of like when Lucy stepped through the wardrobe and visited Narnia. It was easy to get lost for a few hours, maybe picking out a new Tom Swift or Hardy Boys book or finding a book on the top shelf that explained electricity and how to build a crystal radio. And it was quiet, really quiet because the library ladies would tell you if you were being too loud and of course you would listen and turn down the volume or they would give you that frozen gaze which immediately precluded being told to leave the library. It was almost like a religious place of worship, what with the peaceful atmosphere with people getting engrossed in books not unlike praying. Eventually, a big, new library was built and the old library was demolished and replaced by a McMansion. The new library was too big and didn’t make me feel warm and fuzzy but rather sterile and cold and it was hard to find what I wanted.
But that is the real value of books, that moment when you open to the first page and start the adventure as it takes you away from the troubles of the day and if just for a little while, not thinking about hurricanes, assault rifles, COVID-19 variants and moving glaciers although nothing could protect me from the devastating effects of ABBA getting back together.
For those returning to earth, a federal judge on Friday overturned California’s longtime ban on assault weapons, ruling that the law was unconstitutional. U.S. District Judge Roger Benitez said that sections of the 32-year-old state ban on military-style rifles, like the AR-15, violate the Second Amendment. The judge compared an AR-15 to a Swiss Army knife, I kid you not.
As for the glacier report, the Muldrow Glacier in Alaska’s Denali National Park and Preserve has been surging downhill faster than at any time since it was first found surging in March 2020.
Regarding hurricanes in 2021, the Atlantic hurricane season is predicted to be more active than usual according to The Weather Company.
And about that variant, the Mayo Clinic reported that “several variants of the virus (SARS-CoV-2) that causes coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) are creating concern because they contain mutations in the spike-like S protein that the virus uses to bind to and infect cells.” Variants have been identified in the United Kingdom, South Africa, Japan, Brazil and California. Get me my books, please.