42 Dreams of Arizona Bay

Quiet. It’s the library. People are reading, browsing, studying.

That’s the library of old.

A trip to a branch library yesterday reminded me how much libraries have changed. No longer must you live in fear of making a sound. Conversations at normal volume are acceptable.

Overheard the next aisle over:

“That Louis L’Amour was a good writer.”

“He wrote some good stories. It wasn’t just about shooting ‘em up.”

I thought I was going to throw up. Nevermind that I was in the sci-fi section, which is home to some real shit, but some real gems as well.

I sneak a glimpse at the two balding, white-haired old men recommending westerns to each other. One is very old, probably retired, and the other looks to be on the edge. After eavesdropping on more of their conversation, I learn that they are teachers. Great. Teachers who love Louis L’amour. All I can hope for is that neither ever taught English or literature.

I admit that westerns might have more legitimacy in someplace that was, after all, the old west. I’ve never understood the fascination with that frontier life. Never understood the fascination with the dust, the hats, the saloons and horses. And guns.
I live in a place that has a famous rodeo every year. I live in a place where someone wearing a cowboy hat might actually work out on a ranch or an orchard. Where the cowboy boots might actually get dirty.

Doesn’t mean I have to like westerns.

That frontier life is long gone. It’s interesting to read the history of old gold rush towns. After Without A Map went to a ghost town, we started talking about going to a better example, Bodie. Maybe we’ll go someday.

I’d like to see what’s left. I’d like to mingle with the memories, the forgottens shadows of the people who used to live there. Who raised children and died there. Or who just couldn’t make a living there anymore. I’d like to imagine what it was like. I’d like a look at the decay.

But I wouldn’t want to live in the old west. Not a lot of opportunities for women. Bad hygiene, worse medicine. I don’t think we should romanticize a tough time. And I don’t like guns.

I’m grateful for modern conveniences. Running water and toilets. Bathing daily in a shower. Movies. Television. Computers. Video games. E-mail.

Back to the library…

There’s a quiet room if you really want quiet, don’t want to overhear the stupid conversations. This room is entirely glass, and I look in to see a girl and an odd character.
His hair is long and he wears an unkempt beard, but he’s pretty young, in his 20s, I’d say.
He’s reading, and … his shoes are off. Oh yes. Reading means being comfortable, I guess. Hope that his socks didn’t smell because that room is closed off from the rest of the library.
I steal another glance at him, and he’s jittery, looking up from his reading occasionally, jiggling a leg and jerking his head around.
Not so much fascinating as just weird, maybe crazy. But hey, he’s in a library. At least he’s not off trying to become the next Unibomber.

And combining my two favorite things, books and technology, I was amazed by my parting glimpse of the library. The checkout system.

The library now has stations where you scan in your library card, place you books on a scanning mat and then your books are automatically checked out. Hit print on the touchscreen and you get your due date receipt.

I was awed. It wasn’t the technology itself, but the fact I could do it myself. Not only that, but I didn’t have to scan the books individually; it was already done. I don’t even need a librarian any more.

It’s not often that technology impresses me. I love gadgets. I love thinking about the future.

But many of the libraries I’ve gone to have been behind the times. My high school library was an anomaly in that it was checking out books by bar code long before my public library did. And then that library switched, and ditched the cards and card catalogs in favor of computers. What a lovely day that was.

I was shocked when the public library in another town at home still was on the checkout card system. This library was older, larger than my hometown library. Yet it was more behind the times. It wasn’t until they added an addition to the bizarre, angular 70s construction that they added computers and yes, even computers for patrons to use.

So the arrival of a step beyond the bar code scanning checkout was a revelation to me.

I’ve also had a long-standing dislike of branch libraries. They’re never as well-stocked as the main library, though you can request anything you like.
In Fresno, the branch libraries are no better or worse than the main library downtown. Many of the branch libraries are in old storefronts, which still freaks me out.

I was excited about going to the main library here. A real library! I’d have access to what I call a real library. Multiple floors. Lots of books. I hadn’t had that since I lived in Lansing.
So when I first visited the main library here, I wanted to cry. The building was old, dated, as many of Fresno’s downtown buildings are. It does have a second floor, but it’s dedicated to genealogy. It felt like it’d dropped out of the 60s or 70s, and that many of the books hadn’t changed since then.
That’s probably being a little unkind, but I did expect more out of what was supposed to be the main library. A lot of books. A lot of selection. Comfortable, bright places to just sit and read. Multiple floors. An atmosphere. A place to be happy. A place with lots of books should make me happy.

But the main branch is functional, almost grim. It’s a place to get your books and leave, unless you have nowhere else to go. I didn’t get that elusive feeling I was hoping for: the feeling that I’d come home.

There is talk of building a new library. I don’t know if I’ll live here long enough to see it. My consolation is that if I move, I hope it will be to a larger city where I have a chance of finding what I call a real library.

The branch library near my apartment is lovely. It’s small, newly built and airy and light. A curving, modern outside and landscaping. None of the institutional functionality of the downtown library, and none of the panhandlers. Banks of computers. Lots of comfy chairs as well as more utilitarian tables for research and study.

But what it has in beauty, it lacks in books. I rarely find what I’m looking for, and attempts to request books through the library system have gotten nowhere. I can request books, but I never get the notification that they’re here. I end up talking to a librarian after all to see if she can get my request problem sorted out. I’ve tried three times, and I’m not sure if it’ll ever work, but she assures me they want the system to work, so I should try again.

Overall, I like this library. It is fairly quiet and quite clean. It just still doesn’t feel like home.