A life map, part 2.

The main branch of the Carnegie Library, located across the street from the overpowering Cathedral of Learning, has its own place in my heart, mind, and soul.

It was my mother who first taught me the pleasure and power of reading. She took me and my sister to the library on a regular basis to get books to read. My mother is self-educated; she didn't attend college but was always reading something serious. For a time during the 1950s she was a member of a book group presided over by Arthur Bergholz, one of the leading intellectuals in Pittsburgh. She told me that this experience changed her life and led her to think more seriously. Arthur Bergholz was the director of the Kaufmann's Book Department and he was my boss during the summer of 1969, when I worked there for a summer.

I don't like Philip Roth's writing; I think he has a massive case of self-hatred regarding his Jewish identity. However, he did write a lovely essay about growing up in Newark, New Jersey
in which he explained what the Newark Public Library meant to him. He said that going there to get books was his first experience in good citizenship, and that the Dewey Decimel System explained how everything in life could be catalogued in a logical way. I couldn't have said it better myself.

My experiences at the Carnegie Library were rich and varied and experienced through all my senses. The library had a smell that was made up of library paste, the buff-colored cardboard catalogue cards that resided in long wooden drawers, and a faint sweet smell of cooking that rose from the basement the cafeteria.

On the main floor was the children's room, ample in size with lots of places to sit, read, examine books, and dream. The adult collections and reading rooms were separate, where one could stroll around, picking up a book, taking a look at it, reading the first few pages, and either keep it or return it to its place. I am not an "anal" person nor am I a control freak but I KNEW it was bad luck and a shameful act at the same time to not replace that book exactly where it had been on the shelf.

The library was a world in itself that had space and time for anything--loneliness, boredom (sometimes), psychic pain, curiousity, and most importantly, freedom. Nothing mattered there except me and my mind. I vanished there for a kind of vacation from time to time in childhood, the times that I was a miserable adolescent, then again when I was a young adult and recovering from a painful divorce. It all sounds negative, as a place to escape from reality but it wasn't that--it was a different reality. And the food in the basement cafeteria was fantastic, real food cooked and served from behind the cafeteria counter by nice ladies who made pierogies and baked pies "from scratch"...before a corporate food conglomerate took the place over and provided junk food machines instead.

Yes it could be perceived as a sad story but it is not. It's a gift from my mother and "a gift that keeps on giving." Wherever I lived I've found out where a library is and patronized it.

A final anecdote: we lived on a street in Squirrel Hill; my father got a big promotion and he decided that we should go to live in this weird place called Swisshelm Park. Oh, did I hate it.
I wanted to be in Squirrel Hill with my friends. The first summer we lived there I went walking and found the Swissvale Public Library. It could not compete with the main branch of the Carnegie Library, but it was dark and cool--no air-conditioning then--and there were big window seats where I could hide, read, and contemplate life. The best memory I have from that time is walking home from the Swissvale Public Library with a load of books in my arms and having to pass through the playing fields where boys played ball. They all stared at me and once in a while I got a complimentary comment.