"If truth is beauty, how come no one has their hair done in a library."

Another beautiful day in paradise has dawned cool and dry. It's still but the air doesn't need ventilation. If I were the King Arthur in the musical Camelot, today would be ordered to stay around for a long while.

When I was growing up, I loved our town library. It always felt cool even on the hottest days and had the neatest wooden chairs which screamed sit, read, enjoy. Back then, the library was the one way to get out on a school night. Parents consented thinking this was constructive and educational, but little did these poor unsuspicious people know. The library was really a hang-out, a quiet one maybe but a hang-out nonetheless. The tables were filled with kids trying to figure a way to turn this into something more social. The librarians were even more determined not to let them. The rule then was libraries had to be church quiet, a rule screaming to be broken. Ingenious ways around the rule were discovered. Remote stacks gave some privacy. The bathrooms were downstairs so a short conversation could be exchanged there. The upstairs stacks were another territory primed for a few words. There were only a couple of librarians and many, many teens so the odds were stacked in our favor. I suspect that many of those school night regulars haven't been back to the library since the day they reached the magical age of no longer needing permission to be out on a week night. Too bad, you get to talk now.