An Ode From A Reader

Ahh libraries, they are a place of dust, wood, paper, silence, and so many things I don’t have all the time to discuss. In my early days I frequented the place, in love and every so adoring its many dark and dank cramped isles that hosted knowledge but historical or even modern. But it was more than just my love of books that kept me in the libraries—I also fell in love with with all other moving parts of it. Fondly there were the reading Contests, the battle of the Books, the book Clubs, and so so much more.

For me those early memories of picking up a reading log to read a hundred books by the end of the summer and turn it back into the library for gifts and prizes—oh it made my heart jump, I was excited. I adored the moment and I lived for the experience.

Alas as I grew older and taller, the books got bigger, the pages got longer and mind on those pages started to wander. My smile was shrinking…my enjoyment decreasing.

Where was the mystical wonder of picking up a fantasy book and getting a Dragon shaped plastic prize ring from a reading contest? Where was the excitement of checking off a box on how books I had completed in a month? A month! Yes, a month! I went like lighting and bright like a sparkling thing!

But gone.

Gone.

Those days were gone.

And the years went by and the nostalgia died. Those sweet moments packed way like children toys in the attic.

But I craved it still. I craved that wonder—that wide eyed endorphin rush of cracking the spine of new book or smelling that old musty nose twitching smell of the older one. I wanted that wonder of being in that library reading those books and being around a community of others who read like there was no tomorrow. Yet such a thing seemed like a memory of the past.

People don’t necessarily read in libraries anymore. Nor do they participate in reading contests and get those fun little prizes from those libraries or their school.

Nowadays, we have phones, internets, and computers and the world is so moving at over 25 billion seconds a blink, words, sentences, sounds, everything so fast you can’t even think. Long story short, we’re living fast so fast we might outrun the Flash.

But halt! This a proposal.

What if we could rewind the clocks back a bit but somehow keep moving at this digital pace?

What if we could revive what’s old but imagine something new and great?

And if we could, what would we do with it?

I say make something more than great and something that could make people inspired to create. Does that drum up the sound? Does that drum up the noise? Crowds gather come all, make the noise! Let’s build and recreate. The past is not the past but indeed it’s the future that’s the vision.

This was a loveletter. A poem. An ode. A song. A reminder that’s what’s gone is not truly yet for long.