At Trinity View, on the floor where I live, we have a chapel, a workout room, a hairdresser, a pool room, and a library. I have rarely been in the chapel or the hairdresser’s, but I do exercise a little, play pool every Thursday evening, and spend a lot of time in the library.
I wouldn’t call myself much of a reader of books anymore, that is, page turning in a binder. Most of my reading is done on my Kindle, a remarkable modern innovation.
I started out reading at a young age with home access to a set of encyclopedias which I thumbed through constantly. We also had a complete set of the Harvard Classics, called a liberal education in five feet of shelves.
My favorite of the latter was the Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, the racy late medieval raconteur. My mother had carefully taped shut the binder since the book was on the Index of Forbidden Books. I just as carefully removed the tape from the volume, got quickly interested, and repeated the tape removal many times. (Late in life I became a publisher of Medieval and Renaissance literature when the previous publisher went to jail, but that’s a story for another time.)
The local branch library was not too far from home. On one of my frequent trips, thinking it had something to do with the Brooklyn Dodgers, I stumbled across A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. I was 12 then and have since read it often, and today think of it as one of the greatest novels written.
I collected books, sometimes reading them, often not, thinking sometime that I liked books more than the reading. Biography, history, economics tend to be my favorites with occasional novels. When I down-sized, I donated some 500 books to various libraries and vendors, and maybe 100 to the landfill, which didn’t want them either.
In my career as a municipal finance budget officer, I always made sure the public libraries got their share of the pie, not always an easy task. The library department heads were good friends, such that one was even able to get me named an honorary citizen of New Orleans, where he had moved up in the profession. The certification thereof I proudly post on the wall here as I type had something to do with barhopping with the city librarian at Mardi Gras. But I digress.
We do have a library here at Trinity View. You’ll find newspapers, magazines, and a good selection of current literature, lots of novels mixed with a little spiritual, a little biographical. The turnover is good as an active library committee assures books not circulating are replaced with new material.
If you’re not fortunate enough to live on the third floor, the main elevator stops right in front of the library.
You are expected; don’t miss it.
