Memories

I thought it’d be interesting, at least for me, to take a trip down Memory Lane. This particular trip involves books and where I found them along the way. This idea came to mind since a new bookstore opened in downtown McKinney and it’s made me realize how much libraries and bookstores have been part of my life. The story starts when I wasn’t even old enough to start Kindergarten, which is age 5 in the U.S. I’d learned to read already, though, thanks no doubt to my Grandma Brown, an elementary school teacher. She took me to the Alamogordo Public Library but they wouldn’t issue me a library card because I hadn’t yet started school. Family legend has it that Grandma was quite mad about that. I did end up getting a card at a young age, an orange ticket to other worlds that I stowed in my fake leather wallet. I checked out a LOT of books from that library, as well as from the smaller libraries at the schools I attended. All these libraries would remove a card from inside the cover, write your name or your library card number on it, and stamp the due date on a flimsy sheet glued inside the cover. That’s it, that was the contract. I remember when our city’s library modernized and issued new cards in the form of a manila square that had a small piece of metal attached to it, the metal having your card number embossed so that it could be run through a slick, modern (at the time) little machine that stamped the number onto the checkout card. Seems quaint now in the world of RFID and self-checkouts. Next time we’ll take a look at bookstores.