I love libraries.

I have particularly fond memories of the Jefferson library in Stockton. It might not have been the prettiest, and it certainly wasn’t the biggest, but it was my first.

I recall seeing a puppet show about Anansi (with special smoke effects), and the Hermione Gingold classic entitled “The Winter of the Witch” (featuring magic blueberry pancakes that made people see Happy Laughing Spots). And of course no library would be complete without homemade sarsaparilla that tasted like sweet dirt. Hey, when you’re poor, you take any entertainment you can get… and like it. (Except maybe beat poetry. Even we poor people have limits.)

They also had some books, of course, but I can only remember those few that I’ve associated with drawings. There were a couple of cartoon collections by Charles Addams and Jules Pfeiffer, and while I remember the cover of a children’s book entitled Black Magic, White Magic, I couldn’t tell you anything about the actual story. (I managed to track down a book of the same title and general vintage, but it was different... more of a historical treatise.) I recall a black-and-white graphic novel about the remains of a spacefaring crew having been turned into gnomelike critters by godlike nudists, after having been marooned on a dinosaur-infested planet. After several years, I was recently able to identify “An Index of Possibilities” with a Google image search for “energy volume 1 oversize paperback.” I am sure that this preoccupation with visual imagery demonstrates something really interesting about my brain, and someday soon I’m going to sit down and figure out just what that might be. (But not right now.)

The architecture was open, and natural light poured in through walls of windows. You could go down the grand central staircase, walk by a huge bank of reverse telephone directories, and check out movies... not tapes, but actual films. There was also a forbidding glassed-in chamber where important people looked through rare books and government documents. Of course, this was all way back at the dawn of the Industrial Age (1970), and much of the floor space was dominated by massive card catalogs. The whole place seemed big and safe.

And across the street was a city park with a big fountain in it. After we confirmed my mom’s prediction that one of us would fall in if we continued to run around the edge (that acted as a bench... before the days of needing anti-grind and anti-nap bumps), my mom told Jeff and I that some people would spit and pee in there. That was almost enough to make us get out, but not enough to keep us from fishing change out of the fountain at Weberstown Mall. (You have to be suspicious of a kid with wet pockets.)

The Jefferson Library is gone, of course, having long since been renamed to honor César Chávez. Sure, it’s the same building, with the same windows, the same staircase, and perhaps even the same sense of solidity and grandeur… but it’s not the same library. And even though I can’t go home, I’d sure like to find those books again.

Since leaving Stockton, I have loved many libraries, and indeed, I have run my eyes and hands over books of every size, shape, and content. Over the years, many librarians have also come and gone, but nothing ever really happened… we were just friends. Their faces have blurred over time into a fuzzy pastiche of overworked and underpaid sameness; in fact, that phrase remains my automatic, sympathetic mantra whenever I approach a librarian, or a teacher, or any other person of intellectual merit whom our brain-hating culture treats like so much homemade sarsparilla. It chugs in my head like a cartoon steam locomotive, “Overworked and Underpaid. Overworked and Underpaid. Overworked and Underpaid.”

So fine.

[A Process of Elimination]