Full Circle

by Jaden Devlin

Did you know that when I was five years old, Earvin "Magic" Johnson, the basketball player, had shoes so big I could curl up inside of one of them? Do you know how I know that? I learned it at my local public library in Garland, Texas, outside of Dallas, part of the Nicholson Memorial Library System, in the town where I grew up. There, on the second floor, where the children's department was on one end of the building and the genealogy research department was on the other end, I found a cut out plastic sticker of Magic's shoe on the floor, and I lay down on it, curled up, and the shoe outline was bigger than I was.

I've grown since then, and as I grew, I changed where I spent my time in the library. At ten, I enjoyed the courtyard area, where there were trees and benches, and we could take our books and go outside to read them. At thirteen, I moved up to the coveted 'teen' section of the children's department. Oh, how I remember at age twelve, watching the older kids in that section, doing homework, studying, reading... my, how I wanted to be one of them. When I became one of them, when I was finally old enough to be an official teen, I proudly walked into that teen section, head held high, chest thrust outward. It was a rite of passage, really.

The real rite of passage, though, wasn't the teen movement, but rather, as an older teen when I was finally old enough to wander shelf after shelf of the first floor: the, gasp, adult section.

Sounds provocative, doesn't it? I wandered down every aisle of book-laden shelves, smelt the scent of the books, an unmistakable odor akin to sawdust and age, which permeates libraries and used book stores. There's no other scent quite like it, and brand new books, beautiful though they might be, simply don't get the reverence a well-worn tome can provide.

I remember holding a library book in my hand and feeling the pulse of it, the life of it, flowing through my fingertips. I wondered and marveled at all the people who had touched it, all the homes it had visited, all the fingers that had flipped through the pages. I wondered about the travels of a library book, tossed in book bags, briefcases, desk drawers—shoved under beds, hiding under blankets and read with flashlights, or taken into the tub and read while soaking in lavender scented water, with steam rising from one's body.

If library books could talk, they would tell stories infinitely as deep and wondrous as the ones contained within their pages.

When I was in college, the research department with the thick, heavy resources books with leather-bound covers—the ones you were not allowed to check out—are beautiful and awesome. I loved to run my hands over the binding and caress the gilded edges, avoiding those fearsome paper cuts, of course.

Then, when I became a parent, I found myself once again upstairs, in the children's department, this time with my kids, marveling that my young son was small enough to fit inside of Earvin "Magic" Johnson's sneaker. I turned around behind me, and smiled at my daughter, then a pre-teen, staring longingly at the older girls, who, she informed me later, wore makeup already, in the teen section.

I nod slowly, in a sympathetic understanding, and fight off the urge to lie on the floor and curl up inside the outlined imprint of the shoe.