Walking stories

A borrower and a lender be

March 27, 2024

I’ve always been a fan of my neighborhood Little Free Libraries – four in a 10-or-so-block radius from my house – but especially since I left The Chronicle and stopped receiving free books.  Oh, and ever since Greenberg and I started our ritual prancing/schlepping/barking routine through the Central Haight. 

The two book acquisition methods  – publishers’ freebies, which I used to get,  and sidewalk giveaways, which I get nowadays – are pleasing alike in that the books received are unexpected.  You never know whether you’ll be moved at the opportunity to jump out of your everyday gondola and dive into the swirling tides of a novel set in Venice, to force-feed your family with lentil and beet quesadillas, to sniff at every scrap of dirty linen exposed in some has-been politician’s tell-all. 

You arrive at a Little Free Library with nothing in mind but what catches your eye or your fancy at that moment.  If my own fancy is fickle, I can read a few pages and then turn the book back  when I happen to stroll by again. It’s not as though I ordered it up at the public library.  I did not make a bad decision.  The book just fell into my lap; it can easily fall out quickly.   And  there is more reason to be grateful for this reader’s serendipitous bonanza: 

Having been given my first library card at the age of six or seven, when the two-cents-a-day fines for lateness seemed exorbitant, I still go nuts worrying about due date, which I write in my calendar the moment I bring the book home.  This deadline looms over me until I have returned what I borrowed.  No such anxiety when I’ve snagged an item from a give-away site. .  

Second, a pause to browse  for me is a pause to kick back for Greenberg, who’s learned to use the opportunity –   while I choose between “Anna Karenina” and “The Lost Pianos of Siberia,” two recent finds in this time when we’re all obsessed with Russia – to take the afternoon sun. 

Third, I get to contribute books, thereby masking my tendency to hoard with a layer of altruism.     Anyone whose shelves sag with books, with books lying supine on the tops of books standing at attention, knows that the opportunity to off-load is golden.  This giving and taking is the win-win of the book-sharing experience. 

Ever since the latest, and closest of the Little Free Libraries was installed around here, at a corner less than a block away, I have tried to scan my shelves at least every few days, in order to harvest some personally unwanted but still desirable-to-someone contributions.   The new box, which we pass on nearly every walk,  is often brimming with books, and the stock tends to turn over quickly.

A few days ago, when Greenberg and I set  out for a stroll, I see a man with his bicycle festooned with tied-on luggage and bags paused there,  removing books.  He takes almost all of them, jamming them into one bag or another.  Either the guy is a great reader, I think,  or he plans to sell the books to pick up some spare change.  And either way, I think,  blessings upon him.  I have plenty of books at home to donate to fill that box again..

So the next day, before going out, I do a fly-by harvesting of books on two shelves.  This is an easy stroll through the volumes; hard decisions will wait. 

 I have books, for instance, of no particular value other than they had been signed for me by authors I’d met on the job.  In the past, I have razored out the inscription page in fear that in some embarrassing coincidence,  the author would  come upon the book and realize that its recipient is an ungrateful wretch.  This page-removing ravaging of a book makes me feel guilty, of course, because my perception of books as holy was forged in those early days as a library-user.

 As it happens, I didn’t need to cut anything out of the pile of books I gave away a few days ago.  They have no signatures.  That  doesn’t mean they are without significance.  

But in the day between the time I’d noticed that the box had been emptied and the time I showed up with a bagful of books to fill it, other neighborhood bibliophiles have stocked the larder.    So, as a Johnny-come-lately donor,  I have to  place my copy of “Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care” sideways, stacked atop other people’s contributions.

That book, of course, is a classic. But I don’t have babies any more, and even my grandchildren are too old for their parents to make use of this book.  If I ever have great grandchildren, it’s more likely that they will be asking me if I know who the president is than asking for advice I can crib from Dr. Spock.

 I think I clung to the book for so long not because I used it so often, but because Dr. Spock was such an outspoken opponent of the Vietnam War, and I so admired his willingness to take a stand.   Although T. Berry Brazelton was grabbing at Spock’s best-selling child-rearing advice crown by the time my boys were born, and although  it is now claimed that Spock’s wife wrote most of the book that bears his name, my decision to give it away is in no way intended to be a cancellation of the good doctor.   What it does cancel is my own image of myself as a young mother, worried about how many hours the baby sleeps  or whether I really do have to go to him every time he cries. 

I stuff the book into the box and congratulate myself, both on decluttering my own bookshelves and on squarely accepting the long-standing reality – 20 years past menopause – that I’ll never need baby advice again. Move along now. It’s absurd to be wistful.

Determined not to come home with any of the books with which I’d set out, I reach into my tote  bag for the last remaining two.   Actually, they are two copies of the same book, neither one of which is signed by the author, a man I knew.  I’m not going to name the book here, on the off chance that someone else who knew the author might read that I gave his book away. 

 He wrote about his long struggle with cancer, medically and personally. The book was published more than 35 years ago, and  I don’t remember how I wound up with two copies.  Perhaps I once thought I would give one away to another person who had been diagnosed with cancer.   But over the years, that never seemed appropriate.  If the recipient had asked what happened to the author, I would have to tell the truth:  He died of cancer.

He’d been a successful reporter who was never particularly friendly to me, somewhat aloof, in fact.  Clearly, he had more to think about than trading office pleasantries.    But he was a colleague, about my age, and we had mutual friends.  And what I was  remembering, as I took that pair of books off my shelf to bring them to the streetside Library box, was his mother shrieking at his funeral.  Among the usual speeches about a life well-lived,  and his family’s pride in  the informative book he’d written, his mother’s was the only fitting response to her son’s death.  Of course, there was none of that in the book itself.  

Squeezing some other books together, I am able to cram one of the copies of the cancer book into the Little Free Library box.  But it has  been raining, so I don’t want to lean the other  copy against the support pole; leaving the book  to become sodden would be disrespectful. 

I decide to  do the right thing.  I don’t want anyone to think there is a pile of those books in my basement, and I am  just off-loading them a few at a time.  There’s another of these little libraries six blocks away, and I will just walk over there to donate the second copy.   The book is likely to be more attractive without its twin. The extra walk will guarantee wider  distribution for the book, as well as a better walk for Greenberg.

 But when we reach  the house next to that second Little Free Library, the battered bookcase that had held thegiveaway books is gone. “Wasn’t there a Little Free Library here?” I ask a man who’s just swept his garage, and is swooshing the sweepings into the street.     “Used to be,” he says. .

 I’ve been thwarted, I am  down and I am feeling guilty.  But as we continue west along Page Street, I hatch a plan.   The friendly guard on the steps of the Park Branch Public Library gives  me a familiar greeting as I approach.  I hope he won’t  look too closely at the book I want to re-distribute.  I rush right over to the shoulder-high metal container on the sidewalk in front of the public library, just adjacent to where he stands.

As I approach the book return box, I reach into my bag, pull out the one book left in my bag and hurl it down the slot to an unknown fate. I’d read it, I’d dusted it, I’d  given its author a long-time place on my bookshelf, as well as a permanent place in my memory.

I don’t know whether the library will foster the book, adopt it, sell it  or pulp it.  I can’t  ask, because I am sure a librarian would tell me that what I did is forbidden, a crime to attempt to insert oneself into the Dewey decimal system without a permit.  

Once I was a mother who walked the floor with her infants, wiped the noses of her toddlers.  Once I was a friend who offered congratulations for a book, although the end of the author’s  story had yet to be written. Now, I am thinking about getting rid of things. To be clear, that’s to make room for more. 

I’ve just finishing reading “Mama’s Last Hug,” a book about animals and emotion, by primatologist Frans De Vaal. I got it at a Little Free Library, and I think I want to keep it.