June 14 Sunday - Hooray for Libraries!

Libraries will be open! Well, kind of --- but hooray, anyway!

Nothing indoors yet, which I miss to no end. Libraries have always been a refuge for me, especially when new to a town. It would usually be the first place we went to in a new town. It would be a place to explore, yet familiar, with kind people nearby who loved to read as much as I did, who offered as much interest and guidance as I could tolerate, who didn't remark on my awkwardness or newness around there.  But hey, enough about the past.

After these past months of inaction, our books stacked up all over, there's finally curbside service. We can pick up holds that we've placed through the online reservation system, a privilege of access that not everyone has, although folks can phone in, if they can't get online. It's not the same as browsing the stacks, but at least it can be done.

 

We can also drop off our mini-towers of books in bins at one library in the county (Novato), which will hold each bin for a day or two, letting contaminants wither away before librarians unpack and return books to home libraries and their shelves. I have at least a tower-and-a-half waiting to go back. You'd think I'd read all of them, with all this time on our hands, but not really. 

I've found it difficult to read. I'm too immersed in the anxieties of this dangerous world to want to read about it -- and too worried and anxious to drift too far away from it, to be able to be seduced into the fictive dream of a novel or short story. I find myself impatient with books. TV shows: detectives, British procedurals, whacked comedies, they kind of fit the bill these days -- outrageous, engaging - and short. We can watch one - or two - or three, whatever our attention span is, as we wait this disease out.   Plus the side-benefit; knitting  as we watch.  

But this re-emergence of the libraries, even if only tentative baby steps,  feels like we are beginning to crawl out from this Pandemic Hibernation.