libraries I have loved...

 February is "Library Lovers' Month."  I think it's wonderful, and very appropriate, that Libraries and the people who love them are given a full month to celebrate.  Granted, it is the the shortest month of the year, and must also allow space on its calendar page for presidents, valentines and groundhogs.  Libraries have been a big and important part of my life since I was five years old.  When I was young, my mother would drop me off at the little library in our small town while she shopped for groceries.  Miss Tremp, the librarian, remembered my father from his youth and told me that he read "every book in the library."  Later libraries in my life included the high school library where I loved to volunteer.  No boring study hall for me.  All through college my part time job was to work in the Ball State library in a section called Teaching Materials Services where we created bulletin board and other displays which teachers could check out and use in their classrooms.  I actually got that job because I was an art major.  Fast forward to my next specific library memory.  I was married with two little children when I discovered that the bookmobile (a marvelous invention) parked down the street from our first house for a couple of hours every other week.  It was very well stocked but the librarian/driver would also take orders.  Very luckily, at that time, my sister-in-law loaned me an English pram that her daughter had outgrown.  It easily carried two toddlers and all of our books.  When we moved out in the country, north of Fort Wayne, there was no library close by, but, as more and more people moved north, first a grocery store and then a library appeared on the scene.  The store and the library have been doing a booming business ever since.  Years later I had a job downtown in a building right across the street from the main library.  Lunchtime excursions were so easy.  Even later, I moved downtown and was withing walking distance of that same library.  Now I'm living in the suburbs with a library less that a mile away (also within walking distance).  And yes, as mentioned in a previous blog, I am very happy to be able to make use of that "invisible" library on my tablet.  Andrew Carnegie thought that libraries were so important that he donated vast amounts of money for them to be built all around the US.  Many of them are still in use.  My hero, the ultimate "Library Lover."  In case you're wondering, there were originally 164 Carnegie libraries in Indiana, 106 are still in use as libraries.