Library of Memories

 My thoughts while waking in the wee small hours this morning turned to remembering the public library in Fort Collins, my hometown in Colorado. They were mostly sad and wistful thoughts, because I have such good memories of that place, stretching over many years, such as going there with my mother when I was junior high school, and sitting in the car out on the curb with my books waiting for her to come out. More significantly, when I returned to live in Fort Collins in 2005, I found myself visiting the library quite a lot for research I was doing with a friend. My library card got a lot of use there. By then they had begun using a computerized system for check-out, and one could renew books online. But they still had the old card catalog available if you wanted to use it, sitting in its familiar place at the top of the stairs to the second floor. The reference section was the same.I knew where the newspaper microfiche was, and the old city directories. 

One of the first things I did upon return back then was go on a spate of reading books I had been assigned in college, or attempted to read in the past, but did not finish. I was particularly lonely during those years, being divorced and in my forties, and the library was a comfort, in part because it connected me to the past.

Already by the time I had returned in 2005, it had begun to transform into being not only a library but a day shelter for the homeless---a novel issue in Fort Collins at the time. In high school, one had to go to a big east coast city to see that. But it was not a serious problem yet, as it would become for almost urban libraries in the years ahead. I remember walking by one of the free use computers being used by a gentleman there and seeing porn on the screen. It was a watershed movement. Even if I were going to look at porn, which I don't, the idea of watching it in full view of people passing by in a public library was scandalous to me.

The last time I was there, which was three years ago, we stayed in a boutique hotel in downtown (something that was never a convenience in the old days).  We walked over to the library. I was excited to go back there, because I was looking forward to the comfort of the memories. Inside I found the library utterly changed to point that I don't recognize it. The interior had been completely remodeled. Gone were most of the stacks, the collection dispersed to other new branches on the edge of town, with modern buildings and huge parking lots---much more convenient that driving into the narrow streets of Old Town. The remaining stack were sparse and only chest-high. Never again would one be able to wander through the narrow aisles feeling the books towering over one's head. No doubt that was hard to surveil. Who knows what was going on there.

What had been the entire fiction wing was removed and replaced by comfortable chairs for reading and using one's laptop. The whole place now felt like a bookstore, with pods of books on display highlighting the interests and, of course, the political causes, of the staff.

The old historical reference section, including  the city directories, was removed entirely and relocated to a newly built museum center a mile away, accessible only by car. I was told the materials there were available to the public for two days a week in the afternoons, or by special appointment. It would never again be something one could do spontaneously while visiting the library. Nobody ever thinks of these things but me.

Of course the old card catalog was no where to be found. The younger librarians on the staff had probably never used one. I asked one of the librarians what had become it, as I felt it was a valuable piece of history, that captured the collection of the library at a certain epoch. She didn't know. I could tell it didn't occur to her that it had any meaning. "I think part of it is being used as decorations in the garden of the one of the head librarians." 

I walked out there devastated, feeling as if I had come back to find the place ransacked by vandals. There was no continuity with the past. I don't think I will ever go back there. Why would I? There is nothing left of what I remember.

Does that matter? I think it does. A public library should be a continuity in time. I was glad at least that I did not live in Fort Collins while this was going on, and have to witness it happening. 

Now in my mind, when I think of the library, I have in mind two overlapping images, one of the old and one of the new. They flip  back and forth in my mind. 

All of the updates and remodeling---no doubt they all made sense and were quite reasonable to accommodate the needs of an evolving community, as they say. The removal of my favorite historical materials was done in part to protect them, of course. But I wish they had found a way to preserve it all, the way it used to be, as a living archive of the way libraries once were  In my mind I want to keep the old version alive (with porn filters, however)..