librarian
I remember her as a small woman, but what do I know? I was small myself. She’s in none of the official photographs I have from my elementary-school days, but in my memory, my first librarian is a gentle white woman who wore glasses and was exceedingly kind to this new immigrant. I do not remember her voice, but I do remember that every time I saw her, she called me to her desk and showed me with an almost conspiratorial glee a book she had picked out for me, a book I always read and often loved.
Every now and then you get lucky in your education and you make a teacher-friend; Mrs. Crowell was my first. By second grade she was allowing me to take out more books than the prescribed limit. By third grade I was granted admission to her librarian’s office. My love of books was born of hers. As a newcomer with almost no knowledge of the country in which I’d found myself, I was desperate to understand where the hell I was, who I was. I sought those answers in books. It was in Mrs. Crowell’s library that I found my first harbor, my first truly safe place in the United States. I still feel a happy pulse every time I see a library. I’m with Borges in imagining Paradise as ‘a kind of library.’ Where instead of angels there will be a corps of excellent librarians.
“In Mrs. Crowell’s Library,” part of “The Educational Experiences That Change a Life,” The New York Times, September 14, 2011.
People think librarians are unromantic, unimaginative. This is not true. Ask a mountain climber what he feels when sees a mountain; a lion tamer what goes through his mind when he meets a new lion; a doctor confronted with a beautiful malfunctioning body. The idea of a library full of books, the books full of knowledge, fills me with fear and love and courage and endless wonder. I knew I would be a librarian in college as a student assistant at a reference desk, watching those lovely people at work. “I don’t think there’s such a book—” a patron would begin, and then the librarian would hand it to them, that very book.
The Giant’s House (New York: The Dial Press, 1996), 8.
A good librarian is not so different from a prospector, her whole brain a divining rod. She walks to books and stands and wonders: here? Is the answer here? The same blind faith in finding, even when hopeless. If someone caught me when I was in the throes of tracking something elusive, I would have told them: but it’s out there. I can feel it.
The Giant’s House (New York: Dial Press [trade paperback], 2007), 51.