Library!

This week the road took me to Boise for a couple of days. The first indication of being in a different world was the prop plane I took from Seattle to get here (my first ever prop ride). The second was the state capital building, right in the middle of the main drag into town, all of about 4 miles from the airport.

Boise feels like an older, slower version of Simi that is spread out with plenty of breathing room - that just happens to have a few tall buildings in the center of town, clustered around the capitol. Less than a mile north, the neighborhood morphs into something that feels like old Burbank and old Pasadena - smallish houses that have taken on different character over time and numerous owners - some with the front porches of craftsman architecture that invite you so sit a spell on a gliding bench. A mile to the left of that feels a lot like the Topanga or Santa Susana community. It's small, but roomy... I've been here two days and have been hard pushed to clock 25 miles on the rental car.

The building across the street from the museum is the city library. It's not just a Library, but a Library! Check out the sign - the exclamation point is there! It made me think about the era of my life when the idea of a library had an exclamation point. I was about 11 or 12, and would go there every weekend, looking for the next in the Nancy Drew series, or another Enid Blyton book (she wrote stories that, to me, obviously inspired the school structure of the Harry Potter series). It was there that I borrowed Jane Eyre, Robin Hood and musty Beowulf as a teenager, and LP records of BBC radio productions of Shakespeare plays. "Friends, Romans, Countrymen - Lend me your ears...." That library card was the passport to so many other worlds.

These days I tend to buy rather than borrow, slowly building my own library. Gone are the Nancy Drews, but in their place are a couple of other mystery and thriller series (the Lucas Davenport and Elvis Cole books), and of course art books big and small, thick and thin, and full of luscious pictures of all the art that inspires me. Yes, Library! indeed.