Runner-up Creative Essay Contest

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I learned recently that there’s a word for people like me:  bibliophile, “a person who loves or collects books.”  This condition started in the basement library of the grade school I attended.  My Hispanic parents worked as laborers in the fields, farms and factories of rural Idaho to support a family of eight.  There wasn’t a lot of extra money for books.  They did encourage us to read though, and I started early.  The first book I mastered was The Cat in the Hat Beginner Book Dictionary by the Cat Himself and P.D. Eastman (for some reason, I believed reading this book upside down would sharpen my skills).  Upon entering elementary school, I discovered that I could “borrow” books for free at the library and return them for more.  It seemed like a miracle, and I was overjoyed.

Books became my friends and my window to the world outside our limited community and humble way of life.  I spent most of my free time at home reading in some corner of the house or yard where my imagination took me far away from the surrounding potato and sugar beet fields and showed me new worlds and different ways to live.  I shared the secret thoughts and adventures of my book friends, Ramona (the pest), Nancy Drew and Laura Ingalls Wilder.  At school, my teachers would read aloud from award winning books, such as Wilson Rawls’ Where the Red Fern Grows, Scott O’Dell’s Island of the Blue Dolphins or Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time.  I laid my head on my desk and listened intently.  These stories shaped my values and made me believe in dreams and possibilities.

I moved to different towns in the process of growing up, but always made it a point to visit the local library which served as a reminder of my real home – the world of books.  In Kansas, the Hutchison Public Library grounded me.  I was in a foster home far away from everything and everyone familiar.  The books comforted me and reminded me that I was still myself, just living someplace new.  After graduating from high school, I moved to Jackson Hole Wyoming for a year and worked at a photography studio while I tried to figure out how I was going to go to college.  The Teton County Library was cozy and well-stocked.  My reading choices matured as I did.  I explored the mystical, reading the work of Edgar Cayce and T. Lobsang Rampa’s The Third eye.

I recently moved to a Meridian, Idaho ten miles west of Boise where I had lived and worked (without much time for libraries) for 27 years.  I got laid-off from my job two years after moving to Meridian and life took on a slower pace.  One bright summer day, I made my way to the Meridian Library.  Driving into the parking lot, I was energized by the atmosphere:  mother’s towing children and pushing strollers, seniors with their portable book carts loaded with books and movies, teenagers pulling their bikes up to the book return and unloading the contents of their backpacks.

Inside, it was spotlessly clean, quiet, and orderly.  The sacred library air was a blessed relief from the 100 degree day.  I gave myself a tour of the small, well-organized, single-story library.  Pausing to admire the glassed-in diorama featuring a real pond and life-size deer, I was filled with emotions and memories from childhood.  Though I had lived in Meridian for several years, it didn’t feel like my home until now.  I was completing a forgotten, but familiar rite of passage.