Some of my fondest memories from childhood–in fact, from adolescence, too–are of spending time at Schlow Memorial Library in State College.  As a kid, I loved going there and scanning through the rows and rows of butter yellow, blue, and dark green bound picture books.  The Lonely Doll, A is for Annabelle, and A Dolls’ Christmas were early favorites. Later I found The Finch’s Fabulous Furnace, and, later still, Chronicles of Avonlea.  But it isn’t just the books that I loved then or that I hold in my memory, but the place itself… It’s the reading tables and bean bag chairs from the old children’s room, the hard shiny floor at the entrance by the circulation desk, the old winding staircase up to the adult section, the record albums with their dog-eared sleeves (we practically wore out that Mary Poppins read-along record, and years later I taped XTC’s Skylarking from the Schlow copy), the recent periodicals in red-edged plastic sleeves.  It’s the hushed echo of the outer vestibule and the weird isolation in the narrow adult stacks. 

 

The library has just been expanded–for the second time in my lifetime (and I’m only 31).  There’s both a lot to love and a lot to hate about State College.  That the public library is so busy and so valued in the community–now as it was when I was a kid–is one of the things to love and hang on to.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 22nd, 2006 at 4:28 pm and is filed under Blather, Pennsylvania, me and my brain, the written word, this old house. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.