A piece in the NY Times  today, March 17, about Elizabeth Diamond returning a book to the library only 63 years overdue brought a flood of memories to me. To begin I still have an active library card with the Rundel Central Library in the Monroe County Library System. this was not always my primary library. When I was growing up, the neighborhood library was the Monroe Avenue Branch. It had two entrances, down the stairs to the door under the main door which gave entrance to the children’s section and up the grand stairs to the ADULT section. By the time I was old enough to go up those stairs we had moved and I was using the well stocked and well maintained school library at Monroe High School. I know it was well staffed, I was one of the students staffing it. We shelved books memorizing the Dewey Decimal System in the course of that work,  and tallied the circulation numbers for the head Librarian (yes, capitalized, she was that important). 

Eventually I went off to college where the John Hay Library was the book haven of book havens. For any Brown alumni reading this, that was before the Rock was built. It was in the reading room of that library that I learned of the assassination of John F Kennedy. Although the “Hay” was my home library when visiting  my family in Rochester I used the University of Rochester library to work and just BE in a library. 

At Columbia I worked in the Business School library which was suspended over the gym so the floor had a certain flexibility to it. Other than that and the glorious view out to a new building going up to obstruct the nonview the windows had had been built to take in my memories are limited. I guess because I never came to see it as more than a convenient stopping place. 

Before I return to Rochester I need to make two brief stops.  As 12 year olds our group from Camp Cherokee in Saranac Lake NY went on a canoe trip and eventually we put in to Raquette Lake NY to wait for the camp truck to give us a truck portage to another lake. We discovered the town had a library that was open! We went in to see what it had to offer and we borrowed some books to read on the lawn while we waited. Another story, oft told, my mother decided I need some help reading and arranged for me to spend 6 weeks at a reading camp run by Syracuse University on the campus of a Vanderbilt Camp in the Adirondacks, near Raquette Lake Village. This was after my sophomore year in high school. I was obligated to read at least 4 hours a day! I promised the staff that if they left me to my own devices I would do at least that. They believed me. After 4 weeks I told them I had read every book in the nice little library they had provided and would they please go get more books, anything they thought I might read. I’ll spare you the Moby Dick story saving it for another day.

Eventually I returned to Rochester with Carol who is, if possible more interested in reading than I am, where we immediately got adult library cards in the Monroe county Public Library system, First in the Town of Pittsford and later in Brighton. We moved to the city and started to haunt the Rundel and the new main library across the street which is a three block walk from our apartment when we are in town. Now I access that library from anyplace there is an internet connection to borrow books. I get a thrill every time I open the link and see: