I don't like to look at it often. It prompted a neurologist once to cluck, shake her head, and sympathetically say "such TRAGEDY". Despite my estranged husband's claims, I do not live in it. And I've mostly accepted it.
It's my past. Everyone has one. Some are fraught with misdeeds, some contain nothing but petty dramas, some are shrouded in mystery because the person "just doesn't want to talk about it". It's probably what really made me a writer.
One of my first memories (aside from that one when I was throwing a fit because I couldn't go to school with my sisters), is of sitting at my oldest sister's writing desk scribbling. I knew I wasn't really writing. But I was pretending to be writing. Now, if that didn't mark me as a writer, I'm hard pressed to find something that would! (Well, there are those years and years of cognitive behavioral therapy...)
All that aside, when I do actually look at my past, I'm tempted to look only my childhood, because that was the happiest time of my life. As it should be, I would guess. I was loved and protected, and I had the distinct advantage, to my mind, of being born into a family of thinkers. By that I mean, they were all about the education of the mind and body. My father had a degree in Business, followed up by a Master's Degree in Education. Born to a nurse and machinist, he took business classes in high school and then went into the Army. He was smart enough to use the GI Bill to his advantage, and wound up teaching high school business for 33 years. My mother was born to a Master Carpenter and a former teacher who raised 9 children (5 of them boys who towered over her). She got her own degree in teaching, certifying in both math and English. Now, it is common knowledge that those who excel in math usually do not excel in English and vice versa. I asked my father about that once. He laughingly repsonded "Oh, she was definitely better at one than the other." I have a vague recollection of looking at one of her college transcripts once. I defnitely take after my mother in this regard. While Mom did substitute teach for awhile after college, shortly after I came along, she was offered a position as the pioneering librarian in our little valley, and she never looked back. Librarian suited her immensely. I'd even go so far as to say it was her calling in life.
As for me, I begin my memories of life in that library. To begin with, it was only a few rooms in the front of an old yellow house on main street. The front two rooms - living room and parlor area, the kitchen, and a long sun room off to the side. I remember the smell, though. The downstairs of that house were a veterinary office. Thinking about it now, it seems an unlikely set up. But they were willing to rent the space to the fledgling library. And it had the advantage of catty-corner across the street from our own house.
I played in that library from the time I was three years old. Everyone in that valley knew me as the librarian's daughter. Kids used to come in with their parents and we'd play. I especially remember Rachel Morgan and I playing with pinkish red plastic "Barrel o' Monkeys" monkeys, linking them together by their little bent arms, making chains of them that lifted up and up until they finally fell off their precarious perches. I remember that the music was out on the sunporch in bins. At that time, it was Vinyl. Beautiful black plastic long playing records - "78s"- with lovely, decorative cardboard cases. We had an album of Kiss, and I remembering staring at the faces in make-up and trying to figure it out. I used to spend so much time growing up wandering amongst books and music, and puppets, because we had crafts, too, in the kitchen, and a Junior Puppet group.
Shortly after I went to school, the library had grown enough to need a new location. That caused some confusion for me and my bus drivers, trying to figure out where I should be dropped after school. My sisters had a different schedule than me because they went to school all day and I had half-day kindergarten. I remembering peering out a bus window to see Mom waiting on the beaten sidewalk in front of the library...and watching the bus drive away with her standing there. Eventually, the routine was decided and I got dropped at the new library location, which was further up in town, beside the fire station.
The weird thing about time and places is that, well, time passes, and locations that live in your memory one way become other things to other people. A family actual moved in to the old library location, and the "new" library location eventually became an insurance agency. MY insurance agency. It was a strange experience to walk in to talk with people and stand on the other side of a counter under and over which I once played. I looked at the counter and all I could see for a moment was the cool paperclip magnet Mom once had there. I loved to play with this thing. With a true child's fascination for magnets, I would make paperclip trains that extended off the magnets to see how far I could take them before they lost the magnetism. And that big clunker of a "check out" machine that I learned to use - you slide in a card and heard a satisfying CLUNK when it took a bite out of the card (so it seemed to me) and printed the date it was due back. Back behind my mom's monstrosity of a metal desk (where she kept that plastic cube containing all our pictures), was the children's section. Looking at it now in my mind's eye it was TINY, but back then I could sit for hours reading and re-reading my favorite books and picture books. My favorite for awhile was one involving a boy and his imaginary friend. I can still see the pictures, but, with all due respect to the author, I have a feeling I made up a better story for it than what was actually in it. At least a better story for me, because I still have this warm attachment to that story that defies description. It was like my security blanket.
A good number of years was spent at that library...all through grade school we were there. I spent afternoons and weekend and evenings there. I read Garfield cartoons, Dr. Seuss books, "Dicey's Song," Judy Blume, "A Wrinkle In Time," "The Language of the Goldfish," "Are You There God, It's Me, Margaret," hygiene books, "Sweet Valley High" books, watched "The 5000 Fingers of Dr. ...somebody-or-other" and "Cat Ballou" films on a screen in the main room, joined the Junior Puppeteers and wrote puppet plays, and had Girl Scout meetings. I got caught stealing candy and punished for being unkind and rude in that library. I played "diving competition" off the steps along the side of the library, too, which had such a charm for me at the time, but I couldn't adequately explain to you now.
(continued)
