When I was a kid, I used to be excited going to the library. Not just for the books and all the outing entailed, mind you. I've only just realized this other reason just now, while looking up at the skylights at the library I am sitting in now.
The library we went to when we were younger had these huge cylindrical air ducts along the ceiling. They had holes all along them. And more interestingly, they were painted bright green. I don't know the actual terminology for what those air cylinders are called.
Of course, as a kid, I didn't really know what they were for. I had my intelligent suspicions that they had something to do with air, but that may have just been that. Another part of me always felt perhaps they were part of a secret fun playland (or maybe not secret, just that I hadn't ever seen them been used). You know, like the tunnels you crawl through at Chuck E Cheese, or at the playland area at MacDonalds or Burger King. The ones who usually saw kids going to play at, because of course we weren't allowed.
But yes, maybe it was a sneaking fantasy of mine: I always was inclined to make up stories or my own explanations for certain things. Maybe I just felt that on quiet Saturday mornings, there was this library club of kids who were in on the secret and were allowed to run up to a second place we did not know of, and enter the land of bright green tunnels on the ceiling. And everyone else didn't know this because we all just got there too late.
Now, I'm grown up. I still love coming to the library. That special quiet hush that you almost cannot find anywhere else, the place where people are all dedicatedly focused; reading, studying, researching, browsing, typing. Everyone in their own world, collectively. All all those books: each a world unto its own.
