Libraries, People. Are. Essential.

Last Wednesday I was at my local writer's group, in the 3D printer area of a nearby junior college. (Can I still use that term? Two-year college?) I'd been early, so I wandered the shelves, cursing my footwear that flapped loudly in the mostly silent spaces. Student faces would sometimes gopher above a study carrel as I walked by. It was better than the jingle bells over the holidays, barely. I'm not used to institutional libraries and their determined quiet.

When I finally made it into the shelves, there was no particular plan. Just be on time for the meeting but not too early--several people use the same room in which we meet. So I poked around and found a short stack of books--one on the first fashion house (Worth), one on corn as a bedrock staple for the development of the US, one a collection of incidental pieces of a writer I'd never heard off but whose dedication page caught my eye, and one a collection of poetry from Texas poet laureates from 1932-1966. This book turned out to be so random/rare that it's not listed on Goodreads. It was compiled by Margaret Royalty Edwards and published in San Antonio. $4.95 when it was published in 1966.

And so I checked it out. I hadn't realized that Texas had a Poet Laureate. That there were a plethora of poetry societies in various cities. That Texas had a literary culture that extended further than J. Frank Dobie/Larry McMurtry. Now? Of course. There are a thousand writers working in the state and more are finding their voice daily. But I never realized, as I was growing up, that there was something like that to aspire to/participate in. And I wouldn't have--I wouldn't have been sitting here, music as high as I can stand it, giant blog post growing ever longer, slightly in shock from all the things I didn't know. From the way that history is curling around my ankles like kittens and devils.

My local library drowned last August. The Saturday before I was sitting in our reserved writing space, staring at the walls, the next Saturday the librarians were scrambling to get what they could (the parakeets, for sure) as the waters flooded into the parking lot and then the building.

I can't stop thinking about it. The way that our current administration (Presidential/Federal) seems to think that we need guns rather than books. That history/context isn't important. That we should solve our problems with the kind of vicious, winner-erases-all-competition game theory that embraces 'creative' destruction.

Are we going to build a bigger, better library? Ensure our community has improved resources now that the creek has risen and the destruction has come?

I am frustrated. I am angry. I am grateful. I am amazed.

The good things came from books--from my temporary library. My perpetual remembrance to ignore, work around, defeat the despair that squats beside me as I write? From a book. Tolkien, actually.

Libraries. Are. ESSENTIAL.  If we have to choose our barricades in this time, this is mine.