Library Trippin'

This is a special day.  My daughter got her first library card, in her own name with her own late fines and everything.  She was very proud.  As was I, in a strange way.  In practical terms, this means I now have another slim piece of plastic to carry around in my wallet (three-year-olds aren't great at keeping track of stuff).  In symbolic terms, this is the moment she gets the keys to the magic kingdom.  I am talking about the real magic world of knowledge and imagination that hums and breathes within the spines of each book.  Libraries are the most exciting place on earth, because there is a vast universe of the possible available FOR FREE.  Bookstores are also exciting, but the price tags and eventual bookshelf turf wars make owning books problematic.  Less so with ebooks, of course, but ebooks are just that - less so. A library is a place where everything is possible.  You can learn anything, do anything, meet anyone and visit anywhere.  What can possibly be more magical than that?

I had my first library card at a young age, but I am pretty sure I was already in elementary school.  I remember getting the little green cardboard card and feeling full of the world.  I interpreted it as being the moment I was allowed to take out the chapter books from the high shelves.  The children's area took up a small alcove in the tiny (even by my small child perspective) converted bungalow, and the chapter books - particularly the highly desirable Nancy Drew series - were kept up and out of my reach.  I would have to drag the weird rolling footstool away from the non-fiction section and pull it into the children's nook so I could get my grubby little hands on "The Secret of the Old Clock".  I had to balance on tiptoe, reaching with grunts of effort to slide my fingertips along the edge and coax the precious books off the shelf, toppling them to the floor.  Triumphant, I would gather my haul and set up a camp on the orange bean bag chair, engrossed in the world of the titian-haired sleuth until a parent came to drag me off to the main desk.  

I held off getting the kidlet her own card until I felt she was old enough to remember the experience, to know a time before she had her own all-access pass.  She is making the first early stabs at literacy, and she can know remember things that happened in the past.  I hope I will be able to share the magic of information access with a small person, who was born in an age where more ideas and facts and dreams are available on a device in my hip pocket than could ever have fit in that converted bungalow. Books are magic, and places full of books seem somehow mystical in their collected knowledge. 

Wait until she has to learn about late fines, though.  Sigh.