The World’s Strongest Librarian

by Josh Hanagarne

  CHAPTER 2

  155—Silence

  302—Friendship in Children

  813—King, Stephen, 1947—Criticism and Interpretation

  Forty-five small faces watched me as story time began. The fidgeting kids teetered on the verge of chaos. They waited for a crack in my composure, any sign that I couldn’t hold or didn’t deserve their attention.

  But I’m too big, too loud, too fun for this pack of three- to five-year-olds. Especially armed with a book like No! That’s Wrong! by Zhaohua Ji and Cui Xu. What child could resist the allure of a well-illustrated story featuring a rabbit that puts a red pair of underwear on its head? I waved my arms while I talked and stomped around the library’s meeting room.

  When a small face wandered away, I raised my storytelling voice until it was pointed at me again.

  They were mine until a ratty-looking German shepherd burst into the room, barking like Cerberus himself. The kids exploded into motion. Some cried, some recoiled. Most stood and chased the dog around the room chanting, “Doggy doggy doggy!” The dog was too fast for me to grab, not that I would have tried to grab a strange dog. Mothers locked in conversation dotted the room’s perimeter. I tried to get their attention and failed.

  In ten seconds, story time had ended. I walked into the library and asked, “Whose dog is that?”

  A woman in a blue sweat suit glanced up from her computer. “It’s mine,” she said, before returning her eyes to the screen. She was playing Farmville on Facebook.

  “Your dog is not allowed in the library.”

  “He’s okay.” Type type type.

  “Your dog is in there screwing up story time.”

  Typeity typeity type.

  I turned off her computer. “Get that dog out of here.”

  She squawked and hissed, but she did it.

  I’m not a children’s librarian; I was filling in. But I wanted these kids to understand that books are wonderful and that learning is worthwhile. I didn’t want to lose them to a dog.

  Later, as I patrolled, I heard the sound. Only one thing sounds like paper being ripped—but my mind refused to acknowledge it as I walked through the stacks, looking for the source of the noise.

  I walked around the young adult shelves and stopped. A boy and a girl, perhaps four and three years old, were kneeling on the floor, tearing pages out of a large, colorful picture book, and throwing them into the air, creating an illustrated mess that fluttered back to earth in tatters. “Hey!” I said, louder than I meant to. “Where’s your mom?”

  The boy pointed toward the computers. “Can you show me who she is?” I asked. The boy nodded and stood up. The girl returned to the book and took the corner of a page in her hand. “Don’t!” I said. Her arm dropped. I watched her until she stepped away from the book.

  The boy led me to the computers and pointed to a woman who was squinting into the depths of MySpace. I cleared my throat. She looked at me. “Yeah?”

  “Is this your son?”

  “Why?” Her eyes flicked back toward the screen, where a picture of a kitten called for her attention.

  “Because he was tearing pictures out of a book while you were here on the computer.”

  “Oh.” Her eyes moved to the computer again. Her lips moved a bit as she read something on the screen.

  “And you’ll have to pay for the book,” I said. She jumped like someone had poured cold water down her pants. “I can’t! I don’t have the money!”

  “Ma’am, those kids are your responsibility. If you bring them here, whatever they do is your responsibility.” Her eyes narrowed and I wondered if she might bite me. “I’m not telling you how to parent,” I said. “But you’ll have to pay for the book.”

  She turned to her son and slapped his hand. He flinched and cowered. “Why you gotta do things like this, stupid? This is my last computer session and now I’ve got to quit it!” I envisioned myself lifting her over my head and spinning around a few times WWE-style before tossing her into the ceiling fan. Instead, I went to the desk and told my assistant manager that I was going for a walk. What the woman had said (and done) to her child shocked me more than seeing those kids tear the pages out of that book. And the library’s fan doesn’t rotate at a high enough RPM to shred someone to pieces.

  Had we lost another kid? I’d seen it before. The sight of that boy tearing up that book suggested that books were simply objects for him, not worlds between covers. Just things that made a pleasant noise when rent and scattered. And now I imagined that boy had a negative association to hinder him—read and get hit. Read and it hurts. Books are bad. Mom gets mad when I look at books. This was a reach, but it didn’t feel like it because the whole incident had echoes of every other child I’d seen whose tenuous perceptions of the library could shift instantly.

  Kids like Javier.

  Javier was friendly when he was alone. He was at ease with any librarian in the branch. He asked lots of questions and he asked for lots of books. When he was alone.

  Accompanied by his older brothers or friends, however, he was aloof and uninterested. If he spoke to us within earshot of his peers, it was to mock us. “Oh, please don’t tell me you like doing this job!” he said to me one day while walking through the doors with his brothers.

  “You know I like it,” I said. “I told you yesterday when you came in. You asked. Remember?”

  “Oh, man, whatever,” he said, turning to his brothers for approval. “Like I’d—” They’d stopped in the lobby to make phone calls; he was alone. I could almost feel the confusion and embarrassment pouring off him. But he said nothing. Then his brothers returned and Javier hardened his face and strutted into the library, bumping me with his shoulder. “Oops,” he said.

  We usually lose the boys first. They’re excited about reading at first, but once they get tight with someone who looks down on reading, knowledge, or librarians, their opinions change. Some, like Javier, are torn, at least for a while. Most get swept up in how good it feels to belong to a group, and our group rarely gets chosen. This is frustrating but understandable. It doesn’t mean we quit trying to reach them, but it’s hard.

  I was walking to my fourth grade class at Helen M. Knight Elementary. I counted the falling autumn leaves. A rock skittered away under my foot and planted me on my butt in the road. From this vantage point I saw a culvert in the curb.

  A baby chick sat in the mouth of the pipe. Besides its muddy feet it was perfect, the kind of yellow, downy chick whose image greeted me on Easter mornings from various foil candy wrappers.

  I scooped the chick up and ran home, four blocks’ distance. Mom wasn’t pleased to see me rushing back in the door, and wasn’t thrilled when the chick hopped from my crayon box onto the floor. She shooed it outside.

  The chick stood motionless on the lawn. Four-year-old Megan toddled onto the porch and squealed and pointed. The chick fell on its side and was still.

  “Oh,” said my mom.

  I cried so hard that she almost let me stay home. That night Mom said that she’d given the bird a nice funeral and that now it was in Heaven.

  This was a new idea, this Heaven for birds. As far as Heaven for humans, like the other kids in my Sunday school classes, I had a vague idea of a place full of clouds, harps, and singing. But what would Bird Heaven be like? Bottomless bird feeders full of the choicest seeds? Birdhouses with fireplaces in them so they wouldn’t have to fly south for the winter? A world without predators? I pestered my mom with these questions and she humored me as long as she could. But most of these discussions ended with her saying, “You’ll have to ask your teachers.” I did. My teachers eventually responded with “You’ll have to ask your mother.”

  My dad didn’t admit that he didn’t know things; he invented answers as needed. “Buddy, Bird Heaven is basically just one long worm that birds can eat forever and ever, amen,” he said with all the gravitas of a Supreme Court justice. “And even better, the birds never get full—they can eat and eat and every bite or p
eck is just as enjoyable as the one before it.”

  Dad had converted to the LDS Church—the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints—shortly after his nineteenth birthday so he could marry my mom. He took the lessons from the local missionaries and quit drinking, smoking, and swearing. The elders taught him the missionary discussions at Mom’s parents’ house. He learned about the angel Moroni and the prophet Joseph Smith and committed to read and pray about the truthfulness of the Book of Mormon. He got baptized on Halloween day, 1976. The mask of belief that he donned kept him going to church, pleasing my mom, and he would become a devout member of the Mormon Church. Eventually.

  But he could never compete with Mom on that front. Few people could. It’s hard to talk about my mom without making her sound fanatical, because she weighs all decisions against her faith, but nothing is further from the truth. Nobody laughs more than my mom. Nobody is more playful. Or humble. She’s no grim True Believer. There’s a verse in the Book of Mormon that sums her up perfectly: Men (and women) are that they might have joy.

  Mom didn’t believe that her purpose was to be grave and dour and disapproving of every little thing. Her purpose was to have joy, and nothing was more joyful to her than raising her kids righteously. If a Jehovah’s Witness has ever knocked on your door and demanded that you admit that the world was going to Hell and maybe, just maybe, you could save yourself if you let them in—she was the opposite of that.

  Mom obeyed church doctrine more from a sense of not wanting to disappoint God than from fear of damnation. It was that simple: We obey our parents, and He was the parent of everything. She loved Him. She served a loving being that was as real to her as the chick in the drain was to me. This God provided everything we had, and brought our happy family together, so going against His wishes was either carelessness or ingratitude. Christianity hinges on the struggle to repay an Unpayable Debt, a constant wondering whether you’ve done enough to earn salvation, but this didn’t weigh her down.

  My mom lived and died by the maxims “If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all” and “It’s humiliating to be lied to, so we don’t do it.” She could say this, and live it, with total conviction, because we were made in God’s image. God wasn’t some punk who belittled people for laughs, and He didn’t lie. So neither would she, and neither would we. Or if we did, she wanted us to acknowledge our mistakes and correct them by asking forgiveness.

  My dad was willing to bend or ignore certain maxims if it meant he could have a laugh, make his kids laugh, or have a good story to tell.

  I’d gone to church every Sunday for the previous eight years. I didn’t love it, I didn’t hate it; it was just the way it was. I’d be lying if I said that it was exciting. Of course, being exhilarated wasn’t the point of church. The point was to worship with quiet reflection—the opposite of what an eight-year-old boy wants.

  Church was just part of life, like june bugs in the summer or books on our shelves. I’d rather have been reading my books than spending my time pretending to adore the Bible and the Book of Mormon, which were dull. The stories behind the doctrine weren’t dull. The stories in the scriptures weren’t dull. There was nothing dull about virgin births and Joseph Smith translating the Book of Mormon with magic glasses and Ammon cutting off everyone’s arms, Schwarzenegger-style, when a bunch of grubby crooks tried to steal the king’s flocks.

  The teacher stood before us during Sunday school. “Ammon was a Nephite. Do you know who the Nephites were?”

  I raised my hand. “The Nephites were the good people in the Book of Mormon. Except when they were being bad and stupid.”

  “That’s right, but it’s not nice to say ‘stupid.’ And the king put Ammon in charge of his flocks of sheep. His job was to guard them from robbers and other people who wanted to make trouble for the king. One day while Ammon was in the field, a group of Lamanites came and started scattering the flocks, and the animals were running away. Do you know who the Lamanites were?”

  “They were the bad people in the Book of Mormon. Except when they were being good.”

  “Right, Josh, but remember, when they were bothering the king’s flocks, they were being wicked. But Ammon told his friends that they should go find all the sheep and that God would help them.”

  “And then he cut off—”

  “Not yet, Josh. When they had gathered the flocks up again, the Lamanites came again and made more trouble. So Ammon, because he wanted to make the king happy, started throwing stones at them with his sling. It wasn’t a slingshot like you might be thinking of—it was a little piece of cloth with strings on it. You could put a rock in the bag, twirl it around, and throw the rocks out of it, really hard. In fact, he threw some of the stones so hard that he killed some of the Lamanite robbers.”

  “Yeah, and then he cut—”

  “This made the Lamanites angry. So they took their weapons and tried to kill Ammon. But Ammon was full of the power of God, and even though there were so many of them, he took out his sword and started smiting off the arms of the robbers. Do you know what ‘smiting’ means?”

  Everyone joined in. “He cut off all of their arms!” Noises of disgust and delight filled the air as we swung imaginary swords and recoiled from the imaginary pile of arms that grew with each savage smite.

  “Yes, but he did it because the flocks belonged to the king, and the Lord had plans for him. They were the Lord’s flocks, and Ammon couldn’t let anything bad happen to them. And to show the king what a good servant Ammon was, some shepherds took the arms and dumped them out at the king’s feet. And the king was impressed with Ammon’s righteousness and glad that he still had his flocks. So what do you think the lesson is here?”

  “What did the king do with all the arms?” I asked.

  The teacher’s shoulders slumped. “I don’t know, Josh.”

  The lesson was that we spent the rest of the day having feverish, high-stakes sword battles at home with our exasperated parents.

  But these exciting stories didn’t work on the page. I didn’t like the thees and thous and the stories ended before they began. You could skim a verse and miss a civil war. Reading the scriptures was the opposite of hearing or reading a story and watching it unfold, and that felt like some perverse, literary, alchemical reversal. That a book could be transmuted into something boring. Borrrrrrring.

  This was most evident during family scripture study. Here’s how it was supposed to work: My mom would select a passage for one of us to read aloud, or maybe we’d take turns reading it. And we’d discuss the story and the doctrine in reverent tones and exclaim about how wonderful it all was and say, “Oh, oh, aren’t we so blessed and lucky to have a map as fine as the Holy Scriptures!” We, the children, would thank our parents for showing us the way, and they’d beam with pride at their children’s insatiable curiosity for the good word of God. And then we’d set goals and talk about how good we’d be tomorrow, and then the next day, and the family would be knit ever tighter with the bonds of love and scriptural fellowshipping. You couldn’t listen to someone speak at church for five minutes without hearing about how essential it was that families read and pray together. And so we did. Then we’d close with a song and a prayer and be better for it all. Ideally.

  When we actually had family scripture study, it went like this: Megan and I would groan and throw ourselves on the floor while Mom got the books. Kyle drooled nearby. My dad would wink at me over the cover of his scriptures. He was as bored as I was, but wouldn’t admit it unless he wanted to tease my mom.

  “Can’t we just tell the story?” I asked one night when we were going to read a section that contained a juicy, thrilling war.

  “Yeah, let’s do that,” said my dad.

  My mom started reading:

  And it came to pass that after this tenth year had passed away, making, in the whole, three hundred and sixty years from the coming of Christ, the king of the Lamanites sent an epistle unto me, which gave unto me to know that they we
re preparing to come again to battle against us.

  Blech.

  This style made it impossible to picture the massive battle that took place verses later, or that the victorious Nephites got so arrogant that their brilliant war chief/prophet, Mormon, renounced them and said, “Okay, suckers, fend for yourselves, I won’t lead you.” And this started a chain of events that led to the Nephites being wiped off the face of the earth. Gone! But we got none of that by reading the scriptures word for word. When she quit reading, my mom wanted to talk about the spiritual responsibilities we had, and my dad said, “Can you guys imagine what it would be like to fight all day with a sword that weighed as much as you do?”

  We couldn’t, but we liked to try. It wasn’t that we didn’t believe that what we read was true. But knowing it was true didn’t make it feel like it mattered more. My mom might close with a solemn line like “And that is why it is very, very important that we do what we know is right.” To which we would respond, “Okay, can we have Otter Pops now?” To which she would respond, “Okay, fine, but think about what you—I’m not finished! Get back in here!”

  “Yeah, guys, come back,” my dad would say, hunting for the remote in the couch cushions. “Do we really have Otter Pops?”

  When you join the Mormon Church, you can expect to receive a calling soon. Callings are assignments, ranging from the bishop of the ward to the person who leads the music to the person who greets you at the door (yes, there are divinely ordained greeters). A ward is the name for a geographically delineated congregation. If you live in this zip code or neighborhood, you go to this building for services. In larger locations a stake comprises several wards. Your calling depends on your age and on the inspiration of the person leading the church group you’re part of. For instance, the Young Men’s Organization comprises the male members of a ward from age twelve to eighteen. Suppose the bishop calls you to be the Young Men’s president. You accept, and now you oversee the teachers of the Young Men’s classes, activities, and more. Now suppose that one of your teachers moves away. You have to call a new one. You do this by praying for guidance and listening for inspiration.