When card catalogs weren't terminals. I guess my favorite place in my old home town of Westport, Connecticut was the library. In the olden days, it was crammed into a tiny brick building on the corner of Main Street and Route 1, bursting at its seams. Sometime in middle school I discovered the joys of the microfilm collection, and I would look up the front page of the New York Times on such earth-shattering dates as December 7, 1941, Nov. 22, 1963, and Jan. 11, 1972. (That's the Pearl Harbor attack, President Kennedy's assasination, and my birthday, respectively.)

But, in truth, that's not the library I remember most, because in high school, they moved up the road to a grander, ultra-modern facility. It lacked a bit of charm, but on the other hand, they finally had enough room, and I would wander the stacks for hours, looking at whatever struck my fancy (usually plays in those days). Sometimes I would go to the audio section and take out obscure, highbrow CDs and records (I remember Britten's opera Peter Grimes was a favorite... no wonder I was so unpopular). And of course I would visit the microfiche (mircofilm no longer) regularly. Sometimes, I'm sure, I went there to escape what I saw as a miserable home life, but whatever the motives, it instilled in me a love of libraries that continued into college, where I'd roam a huge library, but less for pure love than desperation about the essay I had to finish that evening.

Today, when I was walking back from the Aquatic Center, where I had just dropped D off to have a swim with K, I passed the Greenbelt library, a place which is small where the Westport library was grand, parochial where the Westport library was cosmopolitan, dingy where the Westport library was bright and clean. Yet there was a line of people, waiting to get in a few minutes before the place opened.

Maybe they know something I don't.