Book Boy

Charlie is nuts about the library. It used to be the only thing that would get him moving was a trip to the pool, but now that the novelty has worn off a little, he's all about the "liberry." Marin and Charlie go three or four times a week.

There is one aisle of shelves in juvenile nonfiction that has all the books on cars, trains, airplanes, tractors, boats, spaceships, etc. He could live there for hours and hours. And since it's juvenile nonfiction, there aren't very many other people around to be bothered by him camping out on the floor). He pulls over one the library's humongous stuffed animals, cozies up, and pulls out piles and piles of books. So far, the librarians haven't complained about the reshelving.


Charlie prefers to read these books alone rather than have them read to him. Marin is kind of tethered to Charlie in the library. She can't leave Charlie alone, or he'll start to wander through the stacks, and it can be mightily annoying to find a 3 1/2 foot boy in miles and miles of 4-foot shelves (Charlie doesn't really see the point of coming when he's called). Marin has learned to snap up a little something from the "new arrivals" shelf on the way in so she has something to do while Charlie studies the engineering of the USS Holland (which, as we all know, was the first wholly successful submarine).

Altogether, these quiet afternoons in the library are some of the most pleasant of Marin's motherhood.