I Assume You're Familiar with the Dewey Decimel System?

The Card That Changed Me

I don’t know why it took me so long to get a library card, I just got one about three or four years ago. I also didn’t have a card in Chicago either, my previous city of residence where I lived for eight years, not out of spite for free books, it just didn’t cross my mind. I was so busy seeing what my life, my so-called real life out of school, would look like, that I had no time for public institutions. Perhaps I sound foolish, but libraries didn’t strike me in Chicago because there are many great used bookstores, my favorite is Myopic Books in Wicker Park. Still open to this day, they grumpily request that customers do not use their cell phones, which pleases me to no end, it remains 1997 forever.

For me, like many kids lucky enough to be in their proximity, the library was a sanctuary growing up. I am from the land of the libraries, Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore City is one of the oldest libraries in this country. The beautifully-brutalist Towson Library, with its epic winding double ramp to the entrance, was so close to my family’s bar I was allowed to walk down York Road alone to get there. The garish nouveau design of Cockeysville Library, a single-story monstrosity with lots of glass and no romance, served as my after-school office, my study if you will, when we moved. In college, I spent hours and hours in another big brutalist cathedral, Mudd Library, four stories high if memory serves, with many corners and womb chairs for naps, a grotesque (in-retrospect) study room for smokers, all in glass so perhaps a friend or crush could be seen within plumes of carcinogen. Yes, I spent untold hours in that living tomb. It was a different time, amazing what we can withstand under the guise of normalcy.

Towson Library on the left, intentionally very dramatic photo of Mudd Library on the right. That double ramp in Towson! So space age.

Libraries were for learning, and once I left school, I was all about living. I think that’s why libraries fell off my radar, I was looking for adventure, not nerds! What would my life look like, now that I was in charge?¹ If this feels like a confession, that’s because it is. It is pretty shameful that I’ve only recently secured a library card, but part of shame’s game is succumbing to silence, and I refuse.

Having a library card has altered my relationship with reading. I didn’t see that coming. I buy books, both new and used, sometimes influenced by the media around me, the city around me, reading the book of the moment, or something that feels like it’s supposed to change my life. It’s never the one you think will change your life that does. Generally, I feel underwhelmed by the zeitgeist book, the one everyone is reading (except for Elena Ferrante, my shining/burning/seething star in the night sky we call this world), the one New York Magazine touts, or someone I know casually insists I must read.

The sense of possibility that I can read anything, and stop reading it, and not have any fiscal responsibility or notion of failure attached to a book, or waste, is freeing. Some of this change is because a book is no longer tied to money, even though I love to buy books. I want people to make money from writing, I want people to make money from selling books, new and used. I think it’s the value of it, did I actually read it, did I read it too quickly? Did I put it down, and haven’t picked it up? Maybe it’s the value of me. Something has changed, where I’m not constantly judging myself for what I am accomplishing and allowing my curiosity to lead the way.

Having a library card has changed how I read. Reading isn’t attached to money and it isn’t about relevancy or keeping up. Reading is about reading. My curiosity has been piqued, and this is the real offering, the fact it still exists. I want to challenge myself, to wander some and stretch out, to take chances. I find myself reading books I wouldn’t begin to know how to find without my library card, and I’m reading more. It’s just there, a giant stone building full of books, like a dream. I’m returning to what reading offered me as a kid, a place for my imagination and brain to relish in new information, new ideas, new writing, an escape. I get to return to that sacred place where it’s just me and the words. For all my love and interest in records, restaurants, music, art, third spaces, scenes, fucking scenes, culture, I guess, it turns out I’m just someone’s dad who likes to read about sociopolitical events and world wars.²

I’m fascinated by how open my mind is when there is no transfer of funds. I’m trying to engage with a version of myself that has always been here but sometimes wilted against the world. My brain is cracking open with discovery, and I wonder what else so seminal to my being is warped by this exchange of money? How else has it hampered me? Is this high I feel what free and open access to resources offers?

I recently read The Picnic: An Escape to Freedom and the Collapse of the Iron Curtain by Matthew Longo, a historical account of the events that led up to the Pan-European Picnic on August 19, 1989 on the border of Hungary, then a communist state, and Austria, a democracy, conceived and organized by Hungarian opposition parties. I stumbled upon the book in the World Politics section of the Ridgewood library, just picking it up because why not? I am endlessly fascinated by the construction of power, manipulation to maintain it, the corruption it breeds in the process, how we live in it, how we contest it and how we escape it.

Flier for the Pan-European Picnic many East Germans happened upon that led them to the gate that led them to leave that police state.

This event, this picnic, is credited with being the first step towards the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, just a few months later. I didn’t pick it up thinking it would offer some insight to the world now. Maybe this all sounds just like history, and, sure, it most certainly is, but more than anything, this book offered me the ability to see how the convergence of these events, people organizing, politicians testing limits, and other politicians refusing to budge, residents desperately seeking a new life, compelled change. I am not a person who thinks history will just magically take care of itself. We make history. People are history.

I’ve been using the word ‘possibility’ often lately. It’s how I feel about Zohran Mamdani feasibly becoming the mayor of New York City. It’s how I feel when I speak with someone about a new project, a new idea, when I work on something new or get to reimagine something. Stagnation shakes off, boundaries blur, self-imposed rules fall away. The air changes. I change. Possibility is transformative.

I’ve written about the importance of joy, but now, months later, I feel that word has been absconded to a location where the act of joy isn’t essential to offset our present day struggles and challenges, but a destination to avoid them. Then there’s hope, a notion most suitably tied to a scratch off lottery ticket, arbitrary and generally toothless. I love scratchers, but they’re not a real plan forward. Possibility is more tangible than hope, less dependent upon jargon and more based on logistics. I understand it, and know we work for possibility, it requires progress. We make it happen.

1. Is this question ever truly extinguished from our lives?

2. Maybe because we’re headed to one.