A is for Auction, B is for books, and AB is for Auction Block

     When I was a child, books were my refuge.  I had three little brothers, lived on a farm that demanded my parents’ time 24/7, and there was no peace or privacy for most of those years.  If I had a few minutes away from chores, or a few hours, some of those huddled under the covers with a flashlight, I read.  Books took me to faraway places where nobody broke my toys or told me I was ugly.  The children in those books had adventures and didn’t have to gather the eggs or pull weeds, or if they did, it seemed like fun.

         “Put that damn book down and get busy.  Go help your mother,” my father would say if he caught me reading my favorite Nancy Drew mysteries.  I’d do what I was told, but dreamed the whole time I was feeding the chickens or watching a little brother of what would happen in the next chapter.

            On Saturdays, Mama dropped me at the Carnegie Library in Roswell, New Mexico, while she did the weekly grocery shopping or took some laundry to be dried in my grandmother’s dryer.  I know now that Mama mostly wanted to see her parents, who lived on a ranch, and only came to stay in their “town” house every few weeks.  The automated dryer was also a labor saver, and Mama, with four kids and a farmer husband, had mountains of laundry and about two miles of clothesline. She’d visit my grandparents while her clothes dried, hit Furr’s like a whirlwind across a cotton field, fill the 57 Oldsmobile’s trunk with comestibles, and swing by the library to pick me up.  All of this happened between 9AM and eleven.  She then drove the ten miles home and got a hot meal ready for Daddy and the boys by noon.

            In those two hours, I amassed a pile of books to hopefully tide me over until the next Saturday.  By fourth grade, Mama had to give Mrs. Langford, the children’s librarian, written permission for me to check out books from the grownup library upstairs.  I was in heaven.  I discovered Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Joseph Conrad, and later, Ian Fleming, Margaret Mitchell, and the New York Times Bestseller List.  Mama and I, and even my grandmother, who subscribed to Book of the Month, shared books and discussed them. I discovered new worlds.

            Last week, in our local paper, the headline read, “Historic Library on the Auction Block. The Carnegie Library in Roswell, New Mexico, has been vacant for over thirty years.  Its white limestone walls and terra cotta tile steps still look inviting when I pass the corner of Third Street and Richardson Avenue.  Around the corner the door which led to the Children’s Library looks the same as it did fifty years ago.  Has it really been fifty years? 

             Instantly, I can smell the familiar odor of Mrs. Langford’s card file and feel the worn-soft  Babar books, pages turned by hundreds of little sticky fingers.  I close my eyes, and  see a reading circle and hear her read to us at story time.  The squeak of the dumbwaiter which carried books up and down, and the scuffing of shoes under the tables in the “quiet area,” where I studied as a high-schooler and, later, as a college student.  I am so moved, so hurt, so angry.  My safe place, the magical world, my most favorite childhood haunt, might be destroyed. 

            “Too far gone, too expensive to restore, not enough parking,” the quotes in the paper read.  They saved a gas station from the 40’s from being demolished…someone even donated $40K.  But the Carnegie Library, symbol of American hope, seeded by a Scottish immigrant who believed in the value of learning and books for everyone?  What is wrong with this picture?

             I feel the lump in my throat, and have to blink back tears.  My grandmother went door to door collecting money to help build that refuge, that haven of knowledge, adventure, and joy.  When the town outgrew the old building, others took up the cause and raised funds for our present library.  I spent the afternoon there, just today, re-reading Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, remembering the first time I met Scout and Atticus. 

            I will always love books and libraries, and I will forever be grateful for that lovely white icon at the corner of Third and Richardson.  Roswell, I love you, but I fail to see the value of a gas station over a library.  What would Mrs. Langford think?