Memories of a Carnegie Library

I don’t really remember the outside
because I couldn’t wait to get inside.
I had to climb stairs to get there, so those
are crisp, but the bricks, bushes, pillars
are blurry & unfamiliar. Can’t say
if they were like other libraries.
I never looked up, but always forward.
Climbing the steps was like going to church.
The stairs outside: concrete, warm and gritty.
Open the first door, and it was dim and cool.
Dim, cool, and quiet as a sacred place.
Inside there were more stairs, and more before
large heavy doors in front of the long desk.
Children’s books to the right and back. Youth books
to the right, and right again. The rest were,
of course, for the grown ups, and not for us.
The stairs inside: marble, slippery, cool.
The outside edge of the inside stairs curled
around a column on each side, rounded
in a broad bottom step, where I’d hide
with ‘my’ books in the echoing chill, until
it was time to go home with my parents.
When I was old enough to walk there alone
I’d be at the library every day
there wasn’t school or church. That was summer.
Ten books a day. Ten books every day.
“You know,” the librarian chatted, “you don’t
need to bring them back the next day. You can
keep them long enough to read them.” I blinked.
“But,” I said, “I did. Read them.” She blinked. “Oh.”
Ten books a day. Ten books every day.
Until they ran out. That surprised them, too.
I don’t remember who took me by the hand
back to “Children’s,” trying to find something
I hadn’t read. I remember the books
on the low shelves: red and brown in worn cloth,
blue and green in crinkled plastic covers;
the picture books, the biographies, science,
history, fiction, … Large leathery chairs
in the corners of the room as we walked
around the entire wall. Short wooden stools,
a patch of carpet, large paned windows.
I looked up expectantly. “Are there more?”