Week 54: Karmen Ghia

Convertible weather may soon be coming to a close here in Ohio, friends, but there is still plenty of time for a top-down, fall drive in the crisp autumn air to look at the leaves, just now beginning to forget their green.

This week's tiny car, a Matchbox diecast of an older model Karmen Ghia convertible (even if you are not a 'car person' tell me this isn't cool and exotic?), represents a car that is fast, difficult to spell, exciting, and full of exotic mystery, so of course it reminds me of...

                                                                    ... libraries.

One of my earliest memories is getting Leo Leoni's picture book Frederick (I had the heart of an English major even at age five) from our tiny library in the Kinderhouse, the brick kindergarten building in the small town where I grew up. I remember how amazed I was to find a place hidden away where you could pick out books to enjoy -- to me it was the equivalent of some sort of hidden garden with Creamsicles and colored lights. Ah, how I loved libraries.

Now, I take my own kids to our local library, and while some say libraries may be singing their swan song against the rush of digital books and online media, they are still places of magic for my kids, even if part of the draw is to play on the computers. No matter, it is still that mystery, that sense of being surrounded by words and meaning just outside of their grasp, that fuels the excitement, and the thrill of the hunt of finding that ultimate cool book.

You may be saying, "Well, that covers exotic, and mysterious, and difficult to spell, but I'm not getting fast."

Take a two year old to a library. You'll understand the connection to fast.

Rows of organized shelves with big open race tracks of carpet.  How can you not run? The act almost seems obligatory if you are two.

I love libraries, but if I could build my own fantasy library, the one thing I would change would be those ordered rows, not to stop Baby G from tearing down their book-lined tunnels, but to turbocharge the mystery. I would offer order, but I would also offer nooks and crannies and unexpected finds, twists and turns, unexpected rooms of literary finds, varying heights of ceiling, shelves hidden behind curtains, basements,  and winding, unexpected turns. Libraries are about mystery, and my library would emphasize this through its physical construction.

Baby G would still run, but it would be a circuit race, not a quarter mile.

I embrace e-books and all they hold, but I simultaneously embrace the gift of paper and binding. If as a society we primarily move to digital, I hope we will always have libraries as a physical place of intellectual mystery for our kids to explore. And for me.

Libraries are the Karmen Ghias of words.

The photo of the Karmen Ghia on the road to learning courtesy of Photographer Phil Pekarcik.