No Pattern for Love

I don't remember how old I was when I first started visiting our town's little library. It was housed in the basement of the bank on Main Street. Mrs. Clark, who'd been my second-grade teacher, was the summer librarian. She was as bitch-faced a librarian as she was as a teacher. Memory tells me that I visited the library with Peggy, my bestie, at least once a week. We liked romantic pre-teen novels, even though they were probably not age-appropriate for our little selves. We would return from the library and settle in on Peggy's bunk-bed, well-supplied with penny candy and a good book.

So I remember taking out No Pattern for Love by I-don't-know-who, a story about a girl who was very, very good at sewing, a Home Ec stand-out. Somehow she abandons her sewing machine long enough to fall in love, but I think the relationship encounters some snags and cannot be stitched back up. (I'm making up most of this; I have no idea what the plot was.)

This is the important part: While the book lived at my house, my dog decided it smelled good enough to munch on, and so she did. The bottom corner was pretty well chewed up. My mother told me that I would have to return the book and pay for the damage, a punishment that would deplete the nickels and dimes I'd been saving for, I don't know, maybe a hula-hoop? I nervously headed for the library and presented Mrs. Clark with the damaged goods. She checked the price of the book (what could it have been? A buck and a quarter?) and I forked over the money. And Mrs. Clark kept the book.

When I returned home, my mother reacted to this injustice. I guess she thought I would have had to pay a fine, like maybe a dime, not the whole cost of the book. She directed me to return to the library and confront Mrs. Clark. I was to inform her that if I paid for the book, it was rightfully mine and she should hand it over. This was way out of my comfort zone. But I followed my mother's directive and returned home with the chewed-upon book, no good to me anymore, as I'd already read the darn thing.

Years later, before my mother sold and moved out of her house, we retrieved whatever she still had that belonged to us. There was a bookshelf in the attic that contained an assortment of books that we didn't know what to do with. There, on a bottom shelf, was a chewed-up copy of No Pattern for Love. Heaven forbid that my mother would have ever gotten rid of anything.

On that bookshelf, I found another book that held a story of my literary youth. As a teenager, ever curious about all the facts of life that my parents didn't tell me, I sought answers in books. I somehow procured a paperback copy of Boys and Girls Together by William Goldman, a 700+ page complex story "just loaded with sex," as one review exclaimed. Ah, but I was clever! I tore off the front cover of the book (a sketch of naked lovers), and just to be sure, I got a pack of matches and an ashtray and burned the offending cover up.

I had a long way to go in terms of mastering "clever." Of course, the lack of a cover on the book I was absorbed in aroused suspicion in my ever-vigilant mother. She confronted me with the book, shamed me for reading obscene trash, and took the book away, saying that she was going to burn the rest of it. I was devastated; I'd only been half-way through the book and there was so much more to learn from its pages.

Did I mention that my mother never got rid of anything (a trait that I've inherited)? There was the book she'd never burned, on the top shelf of the bookcase in the attic. If I'd only known.

When I had children of my own, I decided that no book was off-limits to them. I will admit, there were times when this permissiveness made me uneasy, as my daughters were prolific readers, weary of the age-appropriate books that they'd already read a dozen times. But I held to my promise: my kids could read whatever the hell they wanted. And they're still doing that. Like all the time. No regrets.

There's a lot of love in this post: libraries, Peggy, my mother, my dog, my daughters, and of course, books. Is there a pattern? It must be this: make books available and kids will read them.