where your treasure is

When I was a little girl we spent a lot of time at the library.

I grew up in a small town, within walking distance of McCord Memorial (a bit of a longish walk for kiddie legs, but walking distance nonetheless).  About once a week or so Mom would take my sister and me by the hand and trek over with us to that grand, quiet repository of human thought and imagination to let us peruse the shelves and check out a few new books. 

I always loved pushing open the heavy glass doors and inhaling deeply the gorgeous library smell of endless catalogued books: dust and silence and binding glue and vast masses of paper, carrying within their pages all the secrets of the universe, gateways to new worlds: the keys to all kingdoms.  McCord was a split level at the side entrance: The wide carpeted stairs led up to the grownup sections and down to the children's library.  I liked to gaze longingly up the stairs for a few seconds before sprinting excitedly down to find a new printed friend.

As I grew from childhood to adolescence, gradually trading Come Again, Pelican and Lonesome Lester for every single Wizard of Oz book and Nancy Drew, I relied increasingly on fiction as my atlas of a difficult world.  

The moment when I found And Both Were Young was life-altering.

I only know this in retrospect; memory is a funny, patchy thing.  This profoundly influential book left surprisingly little record in my brain of its first appearance in my life.  It's like there was never a time when I wasn't intimately familiar with the forest green book tape that bound the battered spine, or the hand-written title tracking down the edge in white letters (the words uncapitalized, the title ending in a period). 

I think I had been eyeing it for a long time before I finally slipped a finger into the valley of pages between the heavy cardboard covers and tipped it backwards off the shelf.  Even then it was an old, old book, a first edition 1949 printing, the cover a dingy faded yellow, deeply worn at the edges, marked here and there in pencil, the pages darkened and brittled by the years.  It always seemed to lie quietly between my hands, self-contained and expectant.

As with most things about which I am intensely curious, and about which I have an intuition of marrow-deep change, I approached it shyly.  The handwritten spine only included the first three letters of the author's last name.  The sleeveless covers bore no synopsis on the back or in the front flap; the front cover was plain and unadorned. This scarred old book, so misfitted among the newer, tightly bound trade paperbacks that surrounded it, gave no hint of its contents beyond its title: And Both Were Young.

A pair of youth.  Lots of books were about a pair of youth.  Most of them were sad (Bridge to Terabithia, I have never recovered from you). 

Books change you.  Sometimes they heal you.  Sometimes they wreck you.  They almost always stamp you indelibly.  I must have opened it to really read it for the first time with great apprehension.

It was fucking magical.

That was the first book I read where I felt truly understood.  The main character, awkward, gangly, lonely, angry, sensitive, passionate and artistic, felt like a kindred spirit in a way no other character of the hundreds I'd met ever had before.  And the relationship she stumbled onto and then built was marked by the trust and understanding that I had always wanted.  The loveliness of this book still makes me cry -- still gives me strength and hope -- still fills me with joy.

I checked it out again and again throughout my adolescence.  That green book tape always greeted my eyes like the smile of an old friend.

Eventually it was replaced with a newer copy; the glossier, less distinctive later printing contained a few authorial revisions that I liked; but I missed the original.

Eventually I outgrew the library and moved away altogether.

Moving back home in 2008 was hard.  I was tired and broken, no longer able to withstand the weight of trauma and depression.  Returning to the place where I'd been systematically destroyed felt a little like failure, and a little like taking a deep breath and turning to face the thing that makes you afraid, when you're so tired you just want to give up and let it consume you.

I faced the things that had broken me, and I learned how to cope. 

Somewhere in the midst of all the transformations catalyzed by my act of resigned, desperate courage, I started going to the library again.  Less to check out books this time than to peruse the shelves of donated and discarded items for purchase; I had discovered, by then, the joys of book ownership, the anchors provided by favorite friends that always sit at the ready on my shelves. 

I'm not sure how long I'd been revisiting the library (still filling my lungs with the old, sweet smell that made me feel five years old and intrepid again) when I saw it.  Green book tape.  White letters.

My heart stopped, then swelled.  Tears flooded my eyes.

I bought it for a dollar.

The librarian made a face when she rang me up; I think she muttered something about its deplorable condition.  I told her, in the soft throat-swollen voice of a person trying not to weep, that it was my all-time favorite book.  I didn't tell her that it saved me through my adolescence.  I was glowing.

Last night in my new place, hundreds of miles from where I grew up, I unpacked my young adult and children's books from the boxes that have housed them in storage for two years to finally give them a home on new bookcases.  When my eyes landed on that forest green spine, my fingers slipped lovingly down its edges as I placed it carefully on the shelf. 

As I changed the sheets before bedtime, the story kept drifting through my thoughts.  Scenes that I can recall word for word, even down to the visualization of the letters' placement on the page.  Words of affection and love.  Moments of courage and sacrifice.  Before I crawled into bed to settle in for my nightly reading, I went back to the hall and drew And Both Were Young from the shelf.

Lying in bed, gently cradling one of my oldest friends, I fell half into the story, half into a reflection on the beauty of the way this humble-looking book came to lie between my hands -- hands that are older now, a bit larger and stronger, a little more scarred, a little more experienced, but still courageous, still cautiously adventurous, and always, always hungry.

 

I love that this book still saves me, still touches the deepest places of my being.  I love that it still leaves me happier, more hopeful, strengthened and whole than before I read it, every time.  I love that this old, battered copy, the same one that my adolescent fingers carefully paged through in a quiet library over twenty years ago, is mine.