I received a letter last month that my privileges had been revoked at the the Louisville Public Library. It was not due to delinquent fines — I was surprisingly in the clear. It was because I live in next-door Superior. Due to failed negotiations between the towns, my family will no longer be able to check out materials come Jan. 1.
For 16 years, our family has been faithful to the library — but our town, not so much.
Nearly 20 percent of the Louisville library’s circulation supports thousands of Superior residents. This represents proportional operating costs of about $250,000 a year. Only in the past two years has Superior contributed anything to the library — $75,000 in 2007 and $105,000 in 2008. The library proposed Superior pay its full share by 2014, starting with a discounted contribution of $125,000 in 2009 and increasing by 10 percent a year.
The Superior Town Board turned down the proposal, leaving Superior the only town in Boulder County without its own library. Residents will have to travel to Boulder or Broomfield for books.
My Louisville Public Library card is now worthless. My children’s cards, bearing their first preschooler-proud “signatures,” are keepsakes, as are the memories we will share of that fine library.
Thursday mornings in the summer were always reserved for children’s hour, where we would sit cross-legged on the meeting room carpet to hear a guest author, sing a song, or laugh raucously at children’s theatre.
Afterwards, we would climb the many steps of the staircase-such an expedition for little legs, to reach the children’s section. A display case featured children’s coveted collections, and one month it held my son’s dinosaurs, the T-Rex tilted to fit.
We signed up for every single summer reading program, colored in the fish, dragons and butterflies on the way to earning free tickets to Lakeside Amusement Park. One summer our daughter lived near FIC HUR, checking out all the realistic fiction by Johanna Hurwitz.
Before our marathon drives to Southern California, we checked out books on tape. One year it was “The Abracadabra” Kid by humorist Sid Fleischman, another it was “Wringer” by Jerry Spinelli. We shared the campiness of a melodramatic mystery through hot, stop-and-go traffic from Las Vegas, Nev., all the way to Barstow, Calif.
It was at the Louisville Public Library that our daughter was invited to hold her first solo art show last year. The librarian purchased special pins to hold the canvasses and posted Anna’s profile on the wall. Family, friends and all of Anna’s art teachers from kindergarten through senior high passed through. It might as well have been the MOMA.
My library card has a second bar code sticker on it for teacher privileges. It granted me more titles in the same call number series and a longer checkout period. Here I found the depth and diversity for my units. Right now my students are reading Native American legends, poetry and historical fiction by Abenaki writer Joseph Bruchac, courtesy of the Louisville Public Library.
I visited the library recently, maybe for the final time. Though it’s in a new location across the street, it has the old feel: the trusted smell of books, the gurgle of the fish tank, a child asking her dad if she can stay a little longer, the drop and slide of books across the checkout counter, and the whoosh-clang of the return drop closing. And there were children wearing earmuff headphones at new pods of computers — the next generation of users, proud cardholders.
It’s amazing that of all the cards I’ve acquired and lost in various purses and bags, I have never lost my green and white Louisville Public Library card. It squatted firmly in its slot at the top left column of my wallet, always ready to be pinched out and presented at the checkout counter. And there it will remain.
Lucy Ewing (lucyewing@ ) is an elementary school teacher in the Boulder Valley School District.
