Wednesday Wonders My dad did not have much education in the way of diplomas and certificates. But he was a welleducated man. His teachers? Books. His classroom? The library. Growing up in Norway, I benefited from free higher education and endless access to academic resources. But I never quite appreciated my teachers or loved my school the way my dad loved his. The library was his place for nourishment, wonderment, and excitement, and he shared it with me. Wednesday afternoons belonged to me and Dad. The town library was about a half hour drive from our house, and after dinner on Wednesdays I would bring my two books from last week out to the car, while he would place his own tall stack on the passenger seat next to him. I was an early reader, and the children’s books on the shelf in my room were never enough; I was always hungry for more. I realized that this was also true for Dad. Wednesday outings were special: we had this wondrous place that we visited together, this treasure trove of surprises and unexplored adventures. I was in safe hands when he unceremoniously dropped me off in the modest children’s section. While he scoured the shelves in the next room for titles of interest, I made my own fabulous acquaintances, from Anne of Green Gables to The Famous Five, from Alice in Wonderland to the delightful Mrs. Pepperpot. The most extraordinary thing about our library Wednesdays was being in a place where I was allowed to sit by myself and thumb through book after book in peace, with no one asking me what I was doing or why I was reading this or that. I was free to take a book from the shelf, read the first paragraph, or maybe just the last page, and decide whether to put it aside to take home, or reject it in a way that a seven- or eight-year old could not do with anything else presented to her by the adult world. It was abundance, and power, in an irresistible and unique combination. This probably wasn’t the case, but the picture my memory paints is of me alone in the children’s section. The only other people I remember being there are the librarians—there were two of them, both women. They were always ready to help me, and they respected my intense enjoyment in being left alone with the books. And I remember how they didn’t greet me with distrust or refusal when I, at the age of eleven or twelve, started venturing into the next room to explore the monochrome spines of the adult novels. I was allowed to find my own way in there, sometimes ending up borrowing books I didn’t understand much of, but also discovering treasures that stay with me to this day, such as the incredibly beautiful portrayal of the loneliness within a child in Norwegian novelist Sigurd Hoel’s Road to The World’s End. Our library visits rarely lasted more than half an hour. When Dad came to get me, he had already checked out a stack for himself, which almost always included some WWII history and the favorite sci-fi writer of the time, Erich von Daniken. Dad read historical novels and biographies, tales of great discoveries and technical innovations, things and topics he found interesting but which in his daily life he had no one to discuss with. Sometimes he asked me about the books I had picked out, but most times not. We had shared a moment of joyous exploration that didn’t need to be discussed. It was during those low-key library Wednesdays that my endless curiosity for what’s inside a book cover was born. Dad is no longer with us, but seeing my own books on a library shelf makes me feel I’ve come full circle. And I can see him, clear as day, reading the spines, nodding slowly and maybe, just maybe, picking one out and opening it to the first page.
Pieces of Happiness by Anne Ostby 978-0-385-54280-7 | HC | Doubleday | August 2017 Also available in eBook and audio editions.