Our libraries deserve your 'yes'
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I have been known to lose track of a lot of important documents. Receipts. Groupons. My 2009 tax return.
But I always keep one small orange card in a very safe place. It was my ticket to the world, and I worked hard to get it. I had to learn to write.
We lived in one of the more obscure suburbs of Philadelphia then, and there was no library. But the library came to us in the Bookmobile. The Bookmobile was the coolest vehicle ever, a building with a steering wheel. When I was 3, if you had offered me the choice of someday driving a Ferrari or the Bookmobile, I would have snubbed the overgrown Matchbox bauble and gone for the literary bus.
It was probably as much of a treasure to my stay-at-home mother as it was to me. Her daytime entertainment options were soap operas or a toddler with a puppet and a handmade microphone (for interviews).
When she discovered the Bookmobile, she marched me right up to the door and asked to borrow some books. They told her we'd both need library cards, which were free, but ...
I would have to sign my name.
Mom couldn't sign for me. That was the rule. All the rights and privileges of a library-card holder in good standing could be mine; all I had to do was sign my name.
Now, I knew my letters. I was just beginning to sound out small words. In the Deep South I would have been reading at the fifth-grade level.
But I hadn't yet mastered the fine motor skills to print. I was working mostly in finger paint during that period.
I couldn't write my name, so I couldn't have any books from the Bookmobile.
This was a terrible setback, but of course Mom signed her card and borrowed some books for us to look at together -- and she promised that she would teach me to write my name.
Before long, I wished my parents had named me Amy or Jill. Why couldn't my name be something reasonable like Ann Bond or Eve Dell? Instead, they'd saddled me with this torturous drum solo of A's and N's. My pudgy little fingers carved the jagged runes over and over until I could put them in the right order every time.
First Published November 3, 2011 12:00 am
