This Is What It's All About

This originally appeared on Sunday, Dec. 7, 2008

If you are looking for a good way to spend your morning you might take my advice and stop by the West Chester Public Library on North Church Street.

You want to time it just right, though, so you get there just about the time that the children’s reading group is breaking out in song. I cannot think of a better experience to put you in a good frame of mind than to sit at a table in the West Chester Public Library looking out on North Church Street while listening to children singing “The Hokey Pokey Song” in the next room, all the time surrounded by shelves and shelves of books.

Libraries occupy a special space in my memory, in the main because -- and I’m paraphrasing Willie Sutton here -- that’s where the books are. The Rellahan family had a reverence for books that was on par with the reverence some Italian families show for particular meatball recipes. A sketch my older sister (now a valued member of the library staff at the high school we both graduated from) drew once of our family shows a bunch of people sitting around a living room, faces stuck in open books. She was probably reading something while she drew it.

There was the Clifton Library at the corner of Ludlow and Ormond in Cincinnati where I got my first library card and paid my first overdue fine, and the library at Clifton Elementary School, which was located in the cafeteria and thus provided me the opportunity to nourish my stomach and mind at the same time.

The Clifton Library was a small affair, very similar to the community libraries here in Chester County, but when I was old enough to take the city bus downtown I made haste for the main Cincinnati library branch, a relatively massive, multi-storied building. School friends and I would make regular trips to the main desk there to request books that we knew were not on the shelves and would thus have to be delivered to us on a dumbwaiter-like affair up from the basement stacks., a particulary magical experience for an 11-year-old. Even now when I return to my hometown I am certain to stop at two places – the Skyline Chili parlor at Clifton and Ludlow and the used book store at the main library on Vine Street.

When I got my fist newspaper job in Sturgis, Ky., you could regularly find me killing time at the town library while I put off writing about the winner of the Miss Union County Fair contest or whatever the tops story of the week was. When I hooked on at the Suburban and Wayne Times in 1980 covering Tredyffrin, one of the first controversies I wrote about was whether to open a library branch in the (then) new Chesterbrook community. The supervisors ultimately decided not to, providing me with the first item in my ever-growing file of Stupid Political Decisions.

I find myself spending more and more time at the Exton Library these days, although fighting for space in the parking lot there is not unlike finding a seat at a Saturday matinee showing of “Twilight.” I also like the painting of barns that have been on display at the Hankin Library up north, and so I visit there occasionally even though it’s about a half an hour out of my way.

But the West Chester library remains my favorite of all. When I try to wonder why I find myself looking at the stained glass windows at the front of the century old building. There’s an inscription on one that shows faintly through the incoming sunlight. It’s from Bayard Taylor, Kennett Square’s famous poet, literary critic and -- oddly enough -- travel author.

“The healing of the world is in its nameless saints,” it reads. “Each separate star seems nothing, but a myriad scattered stars break up the night and make it beautiful.” I am not entirely sure I grasp its full meaning but, like the Hokey Pokey, I am fairy certain that that’s what it’s all about.