Books are our friends
Sunday Star Times March 5 2017
A little kid who is so short-sighted he can't make out the fingers on his hand won't be much of a footy player, but he could turn out to be a decent reader. Before I had glasses, I would literally have my nose in a book. The library was always my friend.
When they built a new one in Palmerston North it was the biggest thing that had ever happened in my small world. It had stairs! And a fountain! It made trickling water noises!
Don't tell me Palmerston North can't seem exotic when you're four years old. Mum would take us there every week and of all the many things she did for us, that probably meant the most.
I have never found a library I didn't like. The one at Intermediate had a book nearly as tall as me: The Funeral of Sir Winston Churchill, photographed in living colour.
Our agricultural high school was home to three hundred boarders, sons of the soil from Taihape and Waitara. The library had a copy of every book Barry Crump ever wrote, and 10 copies of A Good Keen Man.
In the seventh form you could get a high school library card for the Massey University library and I would go there at night. When the real students were sinking jugs at the Fitz I would buy hot chocolate from the vending machine and read about existentialism, and that is where I first read the Fretful Sleepersessay about New Zealanders and got a better idea about why I was having so many arguments with three hundred sons of the soil.
The law library at Victoria University had two smoking rooms and that was where you would go every half hour or so. Smoking will kill you, but too bad. The smoking room is where you always find the best conversations.
I travelled all over America reading Studs Terkel in the Auckland public library. In Wellington I know I always have a place I can go because there are books and coffee and cheese scones and there is sanctuary. Last time I stretched out on one of their beanbags and had a bit of a kip because you can get a very good hangover in Wellington.
The best library in the world is in Devonport. Three years ago they tipped over the old one and in its place they made a thing of wonder, a building that does its own breathing and is still cool when just outside, Auckland is melting. The readers and writers and lonely people and excited children all have our own spaces and it just works and it quietly hums all day and we love it.
There is a Friends of the Devonport Library group which still prefers envelopes to email, and meets once a month in the library. Authors come to speak. It is a readers and writers festival in slow motion. Kevin Ireland might be there and he might be a bit loud and he might have a bottle under his arm, and maybe another in his satchel.
Their newest project has been a collection of the works of Devonport writers. This week they had an event to launch it. Is it a happy thing to stand there with a glass in your hand and see your book in a collection like that? You bet it is.
Writers took turns at the microphone talking about libraries, about being a writer, and there was story telling. People always lean in when someone says words that sound like once upon a time, because we have been doing that for as long as we have known how to make a fire and sit round it at night and try to make sense of what happened out there in the fierce and bewildering world.
Severe and cold critics of public spending ask: why do we need libraries when we have the internet? But a library is not just a collection of books. It's a place to be, it's a place where a shy kid can walk in and find a librarian who can open whole new worlds for them. You can't replace it, you can't find it at the mall, and you might use social media all day long, but you will never feel so much at home as you can in a room full of friends.
