Toronto Libraries

We’ve returned to Canada and returned to our favourite adventures, which have the pretty incredible bonus of being free: visiting various libraries. In many places around the world, libraries are sanctuaries of silence and reading and study and literature and research. But I’ve got a troupe of chaos so the sanctuaries of silence are holy ground that we look at and nod at solemnly and then leave.

I missed it! I missed the feeling of walking into familiar shelves with a functioning library card and all the books and the children’s area and wandering into the fiction section. I missed clogging up the return slot with our graphic novels and bedtime reading and my own hardcovers (the only time I read hardcovers is from the library, otherwise I’m too frugal/broke to afford anything beyond trade paperback). I miss staggering out with our totes bags full, if we’re lucky enough to have remembered them, or books stacked in our arms and threatening to topple out if we weren’t.

Someone asked me what we do at the library, and I didn’t quite know how to answer. We just hang out. The kids arrive and fan out to their various shelves and sections of preference. Naomi is a little more spontaneous, and I feel like Caleb has some inner system that I just don’t know about. Caleb has to make sure he has appropriate inventory for the various times when he’s supposed to be reading French, etc. The kids accumulate a pile and find a table or a nook and they sit and read through their piles, some books saved for checking out and reading at home, some to investigate to see if it’s worth a free, yet precious, slot on the card, others for a thorough or quick rifle or re-read while we’re there.

Begrudgingly, and only because she’s so cute, I checked out two books for Junia. We have too many books at home! I can’t be checking out books just for the fun of it! Someone is going to have to return them for you! Also my library card is chaos.

I missed it, and the library obviously missed me, too, because the books we checked out were generous in their messages of love and hints at the magic of the universe. Stanley Yelnats (from Louis Sachar’s Holes) bringing dental hygiene and a box of stationery to Camp Green Lake to write home to his mother, smugglers at Greenglass House paying for their travel expenses in fountain pen cartridges (on page 1!), Tomoko traversing the city to be a conduit for library books, and picking up some stardust along the way: all gifts from the library fairies, welcoming us back home.

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