Plots but No Plotzing

Gad, it's hot.

High temp is expected to soar to a feel-like 100 degrees plus over the next few days.

When we were kids, 100 years ago, days like these usually meant an afternoon at our nearby swim club. Or hunkering down in front of a fan in the living room for a marathon Scrabble game.

But I also remember escaping the heat by riding my bike to the local library.

Not only was the library a place of access to a seemingly unlimited number of books, which was appealing on its own because of my love of reading. But it was also air conditioned! 

Which meant blissful browsing. Novels in Nirvana. Plots but no plotzing!

The bike ride was about two miles from home. Traffic made it generally safe, but there was a point where one of the road squeezed its lanes together as an underpass beneath an old trolly line. I remember that section requiring extra attention, given the close proximity between handlebars and passenger doors.

Once inside the library, I was in another world. A cool, quiet place with nothing but reading material as far as the eye could see.

I remember often pulling books from the shelves and, in a burst of enthusiasm to start, sitting down in the aisle and starting to read. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if I finished a book before I even had the chance to take it home.

Each summer, the library would embark on a campaign to encourage reading throughout the school recess. These efforts were usually embodied by some method of tracking the books kids had read; I know one year, we were given an empty U.S. map, and each read book was logged by getting a sticker (a cluster of a few states, as the Library didn't expect us to read 50 books between early June and late August). 

Participants who filled their entire map were awarded a small prize and the honor of having their maps -- or whatever the monitoring artwork was -- hung on a library wall.

I can't recall a single tchotchke I received; I only know that I'd have my paper done well before July 4, and often before the library had received its supply of prizes.

Didn't matter. 

I never participated for the prizes. I participated because I loved reading.
... and, well, okay, I was a little competitive.

As I got older, my visits to that library became less and less frequent. The bike was replaced by a car. Enrollment in elementary school eventually became high school and then college, where I spent an awful lot of time in the library and never earned a sticker for it.

I'm still an avid reader. The trips to the library to browse thousands of books is now a logon to the Kindle store to browse millions of books.

But the joy of escaping the heat by diving into a gripping story still has appeal.