The Great Equalizer

We are growing libraries in Prairie Country these days. Elsewhere, there are conversations about closings and consolidations, but not here. Small town libraries are banding together to share books and husband wisely their resources. Park Rapids, Minnesota is just beginning to think about how to increase their library space.

Fargo is in the midst of a significant improvement with the opening already of a brand new storefront library on the north side of the city. And a new neighborhood library on the southside replaces a storefront library that burst at its seams in its short life.

Downtown, the existing library has been demolished and a new two-story library is going up in its place. A stolid red brick building, with massive glass walls, overlooking the Red River of the North.

Some of us liked the first design better than the final one now under construction. Vivid, visionary, it would have exemplified the role of libraries in stretching minds, giving them room to imagine exciting things. But we are a pragmatic people in Prairie Country, and the money wasn’t there for visionary, so stolid will do.

Libraries are part of the fabric and foundation of cultures. The library at Alexandria. The Hittites room, a library of sorts in telling what it is that a culture values, even if the culture itself has not survived. We hunt for cave paintings and scrolls and stand in awe of the paper chase for knowledge that libraries, great and small, have hoarded and shared and shed light on.

We seem to value hockey arenas and football dorms more around here, but that’s a transitory thing. Next year, it’ll be soccer fields. Or some other controlled exercise in war-making. Which is not such a bad thing. Better to be fighting battles on ball fields than bloody fields. Seems a tad more civilized, most of the time. Until a player or parent reverts to barbarian rants.

Libraries are the great civilizers…and equalizers. Anyone can walk or wheel through the doors, pick up a book and sit down and read. No admission required. No gatekeepers. No uniforms to buy or restriction other than the desire to learn…or the grudging chore to fulfill a teacher’s assignment…which has the potential in the library to open the doors toward lifelong paths.

Libraries have been part of the fabric and foundation of my life. Yours, too? The first was an iconic Carnegie library on the shores of Lake Bemidji. At first the giant-to-a-child statues of Paul Bunyan and Babe seemed the draw downtown, but it was the library that brought me back again and again. To discover Laura Ingalls Wilder and Bobbsey Twins and Betsy, Tacy and Tib and…. Because we lived just a few blocks away, I was allowed to go on my own. An adult adventure in more innocent times. A seed planted.

I was in the magazine room of the school library, a student volunteer sorting and filing stacks when the announcement came over the p.a. system…President Kennedy has been shot.

The Carnegie Library in Fargo was torn down for a parking lot. But not before I moved from the children’s section to the main stacks and read my way through all the Shakespeare paperbacks and wrote about the Lafayette Escadrille for a school paper and rode the bus home every week with a fresh stack of books.

Libraries are valued by people in every walk of life. Mausoleums called libraries are built for Presidents, where they can tell their story or keep it from being fully told. Private libraries are standard in law offices and hospitals and churches and even homes. Collections of all sizes, all topics. A repository of knowledge, and a stimulator of ideas.

Because of libraries, we have the opportunity to read the banned, the controversial, the disagreeable, the charming, the world-expanding, the latest, the oldest, the most sobering and the most frivolous.

Celebrate your local library, visit it often in the year to come and support it. Share books you no longer use. Contribute to a building fund. Make it a regular part of your life. And share your thoughts about libraries here if you like, or think about it on your way…and come back soon. Thanks for stopping by.