Somewhere in a box in the basement on a shelf, I imagine (maybe with what's left of Teddy, the stuffed teddy bear I slept with at the time), is my first library card to the Madeline E. Lazar Memorial Library, which when I was a second-grader at Pine Grove Manor Elementary School in Franklin Township, New Jersey, was just about the most important place on earth I could ever hope to get into.
Adult me looks back at those memories now and realizes the library was basically an unused basement apartment in a complex near the school that somebody had set up with tables and chairs and bookshelves and proclaimed it to be a library. All I knew is it had more books than I had ever seen, and definitely, way more than I had ever read.
I think Dillon Helbig would've liked the place, and maybe his book would be as hard to keep on its shelves as it has proven to be to keep on the shelves at the Ada Community Library's Lake Hazel Branch.
-bill kenny
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