It was H-O-T hot in Laredo all during the summer, but especially during the dog days of mid August, which my mom called la canicula. Time during the summer stretched stiff and slow as a piece of taffy. The last school year seemed so long ago. Now there were endless days of watching TV, riding bikes, and during the cool of the night, sitting on the porch listening to the grown-ups telling stories.
The new school year‘s arrival was still too distant to warrant any serious consideration. What did occupy my mind and time was the Confederate troop I was a part of (my neighbor’s toy long rifle fueled that historical wandering) and also my travels in outer space, which I explored straddling a rolled-up quilt/saddle atop my dresser, which served excellently as the cockpit of my spaceship.
I was about to start fourth grade the summer I was allowed by Mama to travel solo on the bus to our town’s library, a place I secretly felt was as wonderful and sacred as any church I knew. The magic was in finally getting to do something on my own. It was thrilling.
I pulled open the doors of the air-conditioned library on the second story of Laredo’s City Hall. I was lucky to feel confident that the public library’s gatekeepers, two gray-haired Anglo-looking ladies seated behind the checkout counter would approve my entry into such a venerable place. They looked much like the nuns at school, except for their exposed gray curls and ears.
For hours I walked slowly scanning titles from both the children’s and adult sections. I loved titles and wanted to grow up to make up my own titles. Was that a job? I took home as many books as I could carry. While waiting for the bus I bought with a spare 25 cents a copy of a tabloid newspaper with photos and a story about an Italian family barbecued and eaten by their madman father. When I got to our stop I left the newspaper on the bus seat on purpose. Mama would not approve of either my buying or reading it.
Trips to the library were my first steps in exercising my imagination into reality. It was my idea to get a library card and also my decision when to go there and when come home. Yes, there were still morning forays into neighboring Yankee territory, and space adventures avoiding asteroids during the hottest part of the day. They didn’t compare with wandering the aisles of fiction and nonfiction at the library. I breathed in the aromas of old colonial furniture polish mixed with paper from new and vintage books, magazines and newspapers. It was more than intoxicating adventure, it was liberating. I had discovered my agency, true, but equally important was that in simply browsing the titles of hundreds upon hundreds of books I birthed the idea that life, however it unfolded, would be plentiful with stories. I wanted desperately to know how other people lived, what they did and what they thought.
My stacks of horse biographies and joke books fed my imagination during the summer as much as the nuns did with spelling bees, religion class and long division during the school year.
At the end of la canicula , a rain shower would fall and remind me that just around the corner was the start of a new school year. Soon Mama would drive us downtown, past the bus stop, newsstand and library for the yearly purchase of a pair of white oxfords. I had little time to miss my dangerous incursions into foreign territories whether Yankee or astral. Summer was like that, there endless and forever, then suddenly over.
