The Library All the Long While Home

 My life in the kitchen had become apathetic. My feet and legs hurt every night after work and that’s if I hadn’t gotten any cuts or burns that day. I was distracted, careless, and vindictive. The kitchen was loud, uncaring and brutal. It was not uncommon. Coming from a salary job in Pennsylvania, I felt I was owed something better. Struggling to get my feet into kitchen boots and in and out of the driver’s side of my Toyota hatchback after a shift, the same car that moved me to Denver from Pennsylvania or Ohio or anywhere in the first place, I wondered what had the fifteen or more years taken from me.

I was stuck in survival mode, smoked heavily on my breaks and self-medicated with alcohol after work trying to get the time back. Deciding to move home to Cleveland and family, I applied on a whim to an academic library.

The interview phone call came on my break in that same car on a sidestreet at work, the setting sun’s glare through my windshield, past the campus and over the mountains. The one thing that really sold me on Denver was the sunshine and mountains, taking retreats, and camping throughout the front range. In the back of my mind, I was sure there was enough food or whatever dish in the oven for the night’s dinner service. Being a chef had gotten me this far, it had gotten me to this call.

That moment also brought me back to my childhood and my first introduction to literature and writing, the poetry of Shel Silverstein and the children’s book The Giving Tree, because in essence I felt I was making my grandmother proud.  She read to my siblings and I time and again, between Where’s Waldo? and Where the Sidewalk Ends, while we sat in her lap in her living room sofa chair in the suburbs of Cleveland, working as a high school librarian for the majority of her life.

One of the strongest memories I have of her lay in her ability to allow me to interpret the world for myself, facilitating a true independence, exploration and playfulness in all of her grandchildren, but especially me. It included an appreciation of books. Her love gave an unmatched strength long after she passed and the thought of her got me through many dark times over the years, from hospitalizations and moves to moments in food service: as a chef, my body was falling apart and the stress was making me physically ill. I was completely burnt out. The well was empty and I was running on fumes. So, I began to think of my grandmother, and even the library, as a safe haven for that brokenness.

On the university library’s second floor elevator doors outside my office is a life-size print illustration of a young Walt Whitman, standing with tilted hat and quote, ”Do anything, but let it produce joy.”

I see my grandmother listening to me read his Leaves of Grass to her while she’s in a hospital bed as I pass by it.

In 2003, she was in and out of the hospital, occasionally losing consciousness, but one night asks me what I have learned from her in my lifetime. It surprises and shakes me because she knows she is dying.

“Always fight for your place in the world,” I answer.

“And?” she asks.

“Never forget what love is.”

The conversation ends, she peacefully falls asleep, I fold the book and tuck it into the drawer next to her and leave the room. It is cold and quietly snowing outside the hospital.

And so, at a recent library conference, a speaker, a public librarian, lamented that he and others had discussed or felt bias in what materials were curated in their collections. Would some librarians, instead of receiving a book challenge or ban in their communities, choose less controversial titles and material?

What happens when meaningful work gets censored?

In 1988, The Giving Tree was banned from a Boulder, Colorado public library for being sexist. In some interpretations, critics identified that because the tree is assigned the pronoun she, it gives the impression to a young female readership, especially mothers, of the expectation of caring and giving unconditionally. Other critics argue that the book encourages selfishness, narcissism, and codependency.

In a world on fire and full of censorship, what are the choices we have?

As a library assistant, I can tell you, it is not always that clear cut. Biases steer public libraries and opinion and while some don’t want their tax dollars going towards something they disagree with politically, do we really want children to interpret the world for themselves?

I beg to answer, we need them to. It reminds me of Ursula K. Le Guin’s quote, “The creative adult is the child who has survived.”

Born in Chicago, the Jewish-American Shel Silverstein was a writer, poet, cartoonist, singer-songwriter, musician, and playwright. He wrote the song “Boy Named Sue” which won Johnny Cash a Grammy in 1969 and worked as a cartoonist and travel writer for Playboy. He had a houseboat in Sausalito, California, owned homes in Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, Greenwich Village, New York and Key West, Florida. He was a traveler, an outsider, and a beatnik, writing music and participating in the folk club scene of downtown New York in the 1950s and 60s.

In a rare New York Times interview in 1978, Silverstein was quoted, “It’s just a relationship between two people; one gives and the other takes.” As simple as that sounds, as meaningful as that can be, Silverstein’s counter-culture lifestyle lends easily to an unfounded discrimination because of his involvement with Playboy.

The government’s suppression of access to an author’s work is considered censorship, however, in this instance moral separation of the art and the artist is not defined. Adults of the day fail at trusting their children to interpret the world for themselves and are afraid, like we all are, of the uncertainty of the future and its repercussions. The sheltering effect of it, the suppression of voices like Silverstein’s—all of it—can be viewed very much like parts to the pandemic in which I had just made my new career.

What would my grandmother say?

As a child, I played with her electric IBM typewriter when she brought me to the high school library.

I love you becaus you are special

Missing an “e,” the copy paper, including the sentence, was clipped and posted to her refrigerator for the next twenty-some years, turning tan and curled at the edges, until the day she died on a Valentine’s Day night.

Her death was a beautiful death, I can say that without regret or remorse and The Giving Tree is a beautiful story. I can say that just as well. The child in me interprets it as much. There is a way to go back, I’ll tell you that much.

After all of that time, I never thought I would have the chance to thank her for everything she gave me, let alone work at a library, too, long afterwards. It’s only fitting that throughout my writing career my own book, a fiction chapbook, had a simple, but vague dedication:  for my giving tree.

I no longer smoke cigarettes and my drinking is pretty limited, my feet do not swell after a shift and my father sometimes says she would be proud of me. I am learning to not just survive, but enjoy my life in service to others. My dad jokes that she would be tickled to know where I work.

‘It’s all about perspective,’ I think quietly to myself, though I still wish I could give her something more than what she gave me.

Maybe, just maybe, this essay is a good beginning to that.

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Silence is not an option