Unable to hide his chagrin, my six-year-old brother walked in the house after school and unburdened his daily troubles. “Taylor, Mrs. Casey yelled at me today.”
“Ok, so Casey is dead to me,” I thought. Nobody—NOBODY—yells at my younger siblings except me; that’s the number one rule in the Oldest Sibling Handbook. Older kids can be a straight menace to younger kids at home, but out in the streets, the oldest makes sure no one even looks at the younger ones the wrong way. Obviously, Mrs. Casey didn’t know the rules. Who does she think she is?
Mrs. Casey is our elementary school librarian. Every week, my brother went to her library and checked out three to five books. He’d read them every night. Sometimes when he was lazy or wanted company, he’d ask me to read to him before bed.
The worst of his selections were always the Star Wars books, which clocked in at a mere 2,000 pages. Jesus, Mary, and George Lucas; some of us have things to do. I was eight at the time, and me and Barbie were booked and busy. I did not appreciate this interplanetary detainment. Listen George: Just because you’re obsessed with the galaxies doesn’t mean the rest of us are. Some nights, I surreptitiously turned six pages at a time just so I could get a decent night’s sleep. Alas, there’s only one bigger nerd for Star Wars than George Lucas, and it’s my brother. He always knew when I missed a detail. I’d think my deception was working, then he’d yell, “WAIT! What about Jabba the Hutt? We missed his whole part of the story, Taylor!” I’d restart the endeavor, knowing full well Barbie wouldn’t be taking that nightly cruise in her fuchsia Corvette.
This particular week, my brother started a new book series, and we read them in order. We were on book three and quite pleased with our progress. When it was time to check out book number four, he returned the others to the circulation desk. He proudly told Mrs. Casey about his progress and how his big sister would read to him as part of a nightly ritual. She listened and scanned books back into the system, noticing that one of them was past due. She loudly scolded my brother. “You tell your sister to pay attention to the dates. This one is three days late!” He walked away from the desk deflated and came home to tell me the story. I was incensed. I held it together for his sake, but my inner monologue was spouting off. “I know this lady must be trippin’. I’m an eight-year-old kid. I’m not some librarian’s inventory thug.” I didn’t understand why Mrs. Casey couldn’t encourage his love of books instead of hair-splitting over due dates. Spreading literacy is her job; she’s missing the point.
This was not my first run in with Mrs. Casey. When I was in the first grade, she loaned books out willy-nilly to my kindergarten-aged sister. My sister was a very hyper child; her daily schedule of kicking hornet nests and stirring the pot left no room for reading, and I was more than happy to police her literary activity. She regularly checked out books she didn’t read. We shared a bedroom, and those books didn’t move after she brought them home. It was the greatest injustice of my life. One morning, I wrote a note in huge block letters. “Dear Mrs. Casey, do not let my sister Amanda check books out of the library. SHE DOES NOT READ THEM.” I told my sister to give it to Mrs. Casey that day. My sister agreed, though she had no idea what the note said. (How would she find out? By reading it? HA!) To me, a library and the books held within demanded respect, and my sister flagrantly disregarded the system. It was up to me to fix this, since Mrs. Casey wasn’t doing anything about it. Maybe spreading literacy is her job, but not like this!
The day my brother told me about his run-in, I stayed calm and reassured him. “Don’t listen to Mrs. Casey. She’s just a mean old witch.” He shrugged it off nonchalantly, but that easy going gene had skipped me—I made a private vow to ruin her.
I knew I would never follow through on that vow. At the time, I couldn’t admit the truth to my siblings or to myself. The truth was that Mrs. Casey was the ruler of the temple I regularly sought solace in, and I wouldn’t know anything about the beauty of books if she didn’t run such a tight ship. Mrs. Casey was the embodiment of a good librarian, and she showed it in the way she treated both of my siblings. With my brother, who was a natural bookworm, she had to be a stickler for a due date. With my sister, she was an ambassador to the less literary inclined, giving every new reader the opportunity to love books. (I regret to report that the lessons didn’t stick. My sister still relies on me to explain books I’m reading so she doesn’t ever have to open a cover. The closest she ever got to having a book in her face was the day I chucked the Holy Bible at her in a fit of rage and broke her glasses—a legal move lifted directly from the pages of the Oldest Sibling Handbook.)
In the following years, I found the vast majority of librarians I interacted with played right on the razor’s edge between organizational expert and controlling shrew. But, by then, I knew that I needed those librarians. The ones who ruled over literary kingdoms with an iron fist, the ones whose devotion to minutiae paved an easy path for me—and those around me—to love books.
This article originally appeared in the March/April 2025 issue of (585).
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