Delores E. Topliff
When
I was a young mom and grad student with two little boys ages 5 and 3, I took
them with me everywhere I could, sometimes even to classes I taught. We visited public and university libraries, some with deep, dark basements, and
others seven-stories tall, for lengthy periods of time. My sons took to them
like ducks to water and cheerfully called them the “book caves”.
That
why I was struck by an NPR radio program of a boy who lived in a
library with his parents and is now a writer. (I borrow heavily from his story
below.) Is there a correlation? You betcha!
Decades
back, custodians in the New York Public Library system could live in the
buildings with their families. Raymond Clark’s dad was a custodian, and their
family lived on the top floor of the Washington Heights branch in upper
Manhattan starting in 1949, when Ronald was fifteen. Later, in the 1970s, he
raised his daughter, Jamilah, in the same apartment until she was five. He
later told that grown daughter that being a library custodian was like being,
"the keeper of the temple of knowledge."
At
first, Ronald was ashamed of his unusual home. But once the library closed for
the day, he loved being the only kid in the building… “If I had any question
about anything, I would get up in the middle of the night, go down, get out a
book, (and) read until 3 o'clock in the morning . . . I began to realize how
great I had it because the library gave me the thirst of learning—and this just
never left me."
Living
in the library shaped the man he became. “He was the first in his family to
graduate from high school”, and (to his dad’s delight) eventually “got a
position as a college professor. Read the full interview at https://www.npr.org/2017/10/13/557328529/how-living-in-a-library-gave-one-man-the-thirst-of-learning
Do
you love books? Do they fuel you with wisdom and inspiration to take on
limitless horizons? While you may not actually want to live in one, share your favorite ways to surround yourself with books. Please also check my website delorestopliff.com for more posts and updates.
Would I live in a library? Ohhh, yeahhhh. And I'd bring my dogs, all twenty-odd. (And they ARE odd.)
ReplyDeleteI love reading and libraries...remember getting so mad when I was nine or ten because I couldn't check out adult books in our library. Mine had to come from the children's section. Could you imagine that now??
ReplyDeleteI'd almost like to imagine that now EXCEPT our librarian gave me (almost) free rein and fostered such love for books, it has been a major gift forever. That dear woman has no idea of how much important influence she was to me and I'm sure to many.
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