Magic

Some people spend their Sunday mornings at church. It's a time to reflect, renew and find a new joy for living as we prepare for the week ahead. I like to do that too, but I don't go to church. I went to the library. This is my happy place, a calming place, smelling of books and full of wisdom.

Do you remember going to the library as a kid? For me it was always magical, exciting. When I was very young my grandma would take me to the main branch library for story time and afterward we'd feed the ducks in the pond outside. My parents took me to our local library all the time because my book habit would have bankrupted us if we always bought what I wanted (I'm still bitter that my Babysitters Club collection has gaps where Mom wouldn't buy a book and made me get it from the library instead). When it was library day at school I'd come home carrying as many books as I was allowed to take. My dad would pick me up from school on Book Fair days and I'd have bags of books, excited at my haul and ready to read them all that night.

I like books.

This morning, I got to relive that magic. I signed up for a library card. Do it. It's awesome. Do I sound like a public service announcement? Good.

The best part of the experience wasn't the browsing, though. It wasn't the armload of books I walked out with. The best part was the noise and chaos in the children's section. If it means that parents are reading with their children, then I never want another quiet library ever again. There must have been 20 families at the library this morning, attending a reading and activity session. Once it was complete almost every family stayed; I was thrilled to see parents helping their young children carefully choose books to take home with them and read. These are parents instilling a joy of reading in their 3,4,5 yr old children! I saw older kids too, walking out with bags full of books. Bags. Full. Of books!

Here was my favorite moment:
I'm sitting on the floor, browsing the graphic novels, pile of books already in my lap (I'd already hit up children's lit and young adult fiction) and I see two boys sitting on the floor to my left, with a book. The boys couldn't have been more than 6 years old. Dad is sitting in a chair just a couple of feet away, reading a book of his own. These boys have the book spread open across both of their laps and they are flipping through it together, discussing the pictures, enjoying the book together. Pointing at the page, I hear one say to the other, "Look at his tail!" His brother replies, "Yeah, it has a hand. That's clever for using underwater."

I have no idea what they were reading, but I'm sure the clever one was really their father, sitting in the library on a Sunday morning, listening to his kids learn to love reading.