The World’s Strongest Librarian

  But today a shelver saw two men raising the bottom shelves! They escaped. We investigated and found dozens of missing books. Now we’re trying to figure out how to entice the shelf-secreters back and trap them. I suggested leaving some books about Stonehenge and the Mayan calendar strewn about as bait. I long to shake the hand of the man or woman who scuttled Accepting the Psychic Torch out of sight, out of mind, out of reach, in the dust below the bookshelves.

  I can’t imagine the monks in the libraries of yore dealing with this nonsense. Waking people up, encouraging them to view porn, vomit, and procure drugs elsewhere. Sure, those monks had to condemn Jews and lesbians, but they didn’t attend patron education workshops because there were no patrons, only themselves. Beyond the occasional visit from a grand inquisitor, they were left alone to use the libraries as they were meant to be used.

  The purpose of libraries—to organize and provide information—hasn’t changed. They’re billed as the Poor Man’s University. (Many librarians also bill them as the Poor Man’s Day Care or the Poor Man’s Urinal.) I love working here because the reasons behind libraries are important to me.

  The public library contains multitudes. And each person who visits contains multitudes as well. Each of us is a library of thoughts, memories, experiences, and odors. We adapt to one another to produce the human condition.

  Libraries have shaped and linked all the disparate threads of my life. The books. The weights. The tics. The harm I’ve caused myself and others. Even the very fact that I’m alive. How I handle my Tourette’s. Everything I know about my identity can be traced back to the boy whose parents took him to a library in New Mexico even before he was born.

  The library taught me that I could ask any questions I wanted and pursue them to their conclusions without judgment or embarrassment.

  And it’s where I learned that not all questions have answers.

  * I’ve had neurologists who write “Tourette Syndrome” without the apostrophe s and others who write “Tourette’s Syndrome.” I’m going to use Tourette’s when I only use one word, and Tourette Syndrome when I use two. That seems to be the most common.

  CHAPTER 1

  808.543—Storytelling

  011.62—Children—Books and Reading

  I don’t like to see children cry, but I couldn’t feel much sympathy for the little guy. I told his mom there was no need to apologize as he sniffled and wept and wiped his nose on his Pokémon T-shirt. The problem? Our library system’s Expanded Card lets a patron borrow a hundred items. But this boy’s mother was playing the Evil Queen and would only let him take fifty.

  It was hard to feel much sympathy for him, but empathy? Oh, yes, I’ve been there. When I was his age, and even today, when it comes to books and libraries, too much is never enough.

  I love to witness kids’ unvarnished curiosity. They’re willing to ask questions because they still understand that that’s how to find answers. Most of the younger kids I see in the library would rather put the question out there and run the risk of sounding silly than go without an answer. Another evening, a six-year-old girl approached my desk with a piece of paper. “Can you tell me how to spell ‘princess’?” she asked.

  “I’ll tell you what,” I said. “Why don’t you write down the first letter, and I’ll tell you if you make a mistake, okay? Then you can write the second. We’ll keep going until the word is spelled out.” She got it and was very proud. I wondered why she thought she couldn’t spell. When put on the spot like this, most kids were better spellers than they thought they were, although there were exceptions. When Oprah was giving away free Kentucky Fried Chicken dinners, a five-year-old asked me how to spell “KFC.” I didn’t laugh. I was happy that she felt like she could ask. She reminded me of myself at that age—whatever I didn’t know, I could ask, and if my parents didn’t know the answer, the librarians would.

  For its first few years, my life was divided by a lightning strike into two distinct chapters: Before Fern and After Fern. Fern, my first romantic love, from E. B. White’s book Charlotte’s Web.

  It was during the Before Fern years that I entered my first library in Moab, Utah, carried by my mom.

  Inside the library was order. Information cataloged into rows, authors, titles, columns, shelves, and librarian’s preferences. Everything had its place. Everything proceeded according to patterns established even before the current crop of ancient librarians began working there. The lights were dim and the atmosphere was the opposite of the manic landscape outside. I slobbered and drooled as she wandered through the aisles.

  “How old is he?” a librarian asked.

  “Thirteen months.”

  “Hmm…looks like somebody’s been forgetting to feed him.”

  They laughed. I was as cube-shaped as it’s possible for a human to be. My grandfather actually told my mom that she should put me on a diet. My mom said that she’d put me on a diet if he’d go on one as well.

  Mom walked away from the desk and began browsing. After finding books for herself, she put me on the floor in the children’s section. According to her, I put a book in my mouth and chewed. When I fell asleep, she picked me up and checked out her books.

  She walked three blocks to our big yellow house, which lay nestled at the base of a red sandstone hill. The house was two stories tall and included a terrifying unfinished basement. My mom pushed a playpen onto the porch, laid me inside of it, and read until my dad got home.

  “How was your day?” she asked him. He told her. Familiar patterns repeated themselves. Cleaning up. Dinner. Diapers. Bottles. Laughter. When it was my bedtime, my dad put me into my crib. He lifted one of the cardboard books that my mom had borrowed from the library and read it to me before kissing my forehead and turning out the light. When he turned and saw my mom watching, he smiled. “I never get tired of this.” He’d begun reading to me about eight months before I was born.

  My dad was twenty years old, my mom a year older, when I was born. They’d met at a uranium mine in Moab the previous summer. He was trying to figure out what to do with his life and decided that shoveling mud was the best way to do it. She was home from college for the summer and was working in the mine’s assay lab.

  When approaching from the north, the hundred miles leading into Moab are lonely and desolate and abrasive to the eyes. The traveler experiences the visual equivalent of a tumbleweed rubbing across his face. The landscape is featureless except for the unbecoming oceans of sagebrush that spread to the horizon in all directions. Mild bumps masquerading as hills are the only visual distraction. It’s so dreary that the highway can’t even work up the ambition to turn once in a while. It just plods straight ahead, as bored by its surroundings as the travelers on its surface. But when the salmon-colored walls begin shooting up from the horizon, the sudden shift is like being smacked over the head with a lovely watercolor.

  An exquisite red bowl of sandstone cradles the road, guiding it along a highway that has at last begun to twist and turn again. Sand dunes roll between and around the rock formations and seek shade at the base of the cliffs. Sheer walls of rock veer off at crazy angles, and the fractured sandstone cliffs give the impression that the whole structure—the mesas, peaks, bluffs, and plateaus—was assembled by a giant toddler with a limited attention span. From a massive block of red stone, the toddler carved out the bowl and threw a handful of houses down into the basin. Then he pounded the rocks with a giant hammer, creating the jagged splinters and pillars that jut out in every direction. In other places, stones without edges have been sanded down until they appear soft as a blanket.

  The town of Moab itself is hidden until the traveler turns and crosses a bridge that divides the canyon walls. The Colorado River winds under that bridge, wrapping the town in its coils. The water is dark, with sandbars peeking up from the shallow spots.

  The uranium mill sits at the northern edge of Moab. There’s no pit, but piles from the tailings of mined earth make a lofty ring like a radioactive Bundt cake or a
toxic anthill. Leach pads the color of airplane lavatory water fan out from the ring. Looking down from the air, the surrounding red walls, the ponds, and the crater caused by the ring become an ugly bloodshot eye, glaring from the ground.

  That’s where Frank Hanagarne, Jr., worked during the summer of 1976. He was the strongest, tallest, funniest, roughest guy in the universe. Frank stood north of six feet four (he would top out at six-five), with thick glasses that could double as blast doors. The left side of his mouth sneered constantly, as if someone had slipped a fishhook through it and was tugging it from an invisible scaffold above his head. He could throw anyone over the moon with one finger.

  Linda Dalton was over six feet tall and had a bust and legs that generated intense interest from the town’s boys, not that many of them were brave enough to talk to her. She had blond hair that fell to just above her ears, as if someone had melted a yellow Frisbee and set it on her head. She was an athlete and looked it. Her squared shoulders were built for climbing trees and fighting with seven siblings. Her legs were long and strong, and she had a reputation for being able to start any motorcycle in town. She referred to men who couldn’t start her dirt bike as “weenie legs.” The moment my dad saw her exiting the assay lab at the uranium mill, her hips drawing a figure eight as they hurried to the parking lot, his mouth flew open and he thought, I’m going to marry her.

  He did, just before the year ended. Little changed in the next few months besides the fact that they lived together and were sufficiently married to get it on with the Lord’s approval. My parents say they got married because they’re soul mates. It’s a nice thought, but if they’re soul mates, they’re made for each other in the same way as cotton candy and cooked carrots are. Here’s my simple theory about their union: Teenagers are horny and Mormons don’t have sex before marriage. For all my mom’s good intentions and lofty spirituality, she was tooling around in a hot nineteen-year-old body set ablaze by hormones. My dad didn’t have the spiritual or moral restraint she possessed, especially before they met, and he was even younger and less mature than she was. They can talk about soul mates and logic and love all they want, but I think agitated hormones won the debate and spirituality tagged along behind. Soon, my mom’s womb was toting a twitchy little embryo around Moab while they made preparations to become a family. On December 1, 1977, they gave the world their first contribution to the Hanagarne race of giants.

  By the time I was born, Mom had decided that she’d stay home with me. My dad supported her decision. For all his flaws, then and now, he could work anyone into the ground and was happy to prove that he could support his fledgling family. And he did, while she stayed home and tried to create an intelligent, courteous, kind, morally upright, and insatiable bookworm.

  Sometimes I think a cliché is best: My parents were my heroes. In my eyes, my mom was nicer than anyone in the world. She could also sing more sweetly, cook better; she was smarter, and was certainly the most beautiful woman. More than anything, she liked to play games. This would only become truer as the years passed. She’d pretend to fall asleep while walking across the living room, stopping, mouth agape, and beginning to snore while we all screamed, “Mom! Mom! Wake up!” She’d take my He-Man action figures and make them marry my sister’s Rainbow Brite toys. Sometimes if we disagreed with her, she’d turn her hands into blades and chase us around, rapidly karate chopping our backs and stomachs until we admitted she was right. One of her favorite pranks was to wait until my dad was showering, fill up a paper Dixie cup full of ice water, and then throw it over the shower curtain. We’d all laugh while he screamed and vowed to take revenge, half hoping that he’d storm out in a rage, naked and dripping. Once, during one cold February, she was trying to get my picky brother to eat stroganoff. “Will you do it if Dad runs around the house naked?” she asked him.

  “Ha!” My dad knew he would never eat it. But then my dad was naïve enough to go and use the restroom. My mom quickly divided up Kyle’s stroganoff onto my sibling’s plates. When my suspicious but defeated dad stepped out onto the porch in nothing but his fraying slippers, he said, “Only once, right?” And then he ran. My mom quickly locked the door and turned on the porch lights. “Let me in!” he yelled, pounding on the door.

  “You have to run!” she said. “Then we’ll see!”

  We lived at the top of a long cul-de-sac, so it wasn’t like anyone was going to see his pale, shivering body hoofing it through the crunchy snow, but he sure was mad when she finally let him in. Until he saw that we all had tears of glee rolling down our cheeks. Then he laughed and demanded that someone bring him a robe. This just made us all laugh harder and he stalked off to cover himself.

  Most people would agree that there’s only one word to describe my dad. But I don’t think any two would choose the same word. When my wife was my fiancée, she described him as a “great tethered bear.” That’s pretty accurate. But she has reason to jab at him. During a spirited discussion (that he started) about which animals we each wanted to claim as our spirit animals (he insisted), he named her Gaagi bechant—which is Navajo for “bird shit on head.” A malevolent bird once gave her an undistinguished gift from above, and she had foolishly told my dad.

  If pressed—and pressing a tethered bear is unwise—my dad would probably describe himself as “Navajo.” It’s how he has portrayed himself—shrilly and defensively—for decades, despite being a white guy. It’s his shtick and it’s funny when it works. He’s got a good tan, but that’s about as far as it goes. The Navajo meaning of Hanagarne is, depending on my dad’s mood, “Leader of People” or “Those whom God has saved.” My own half-hearted attempts to research the origins of my name have only revealed one interesting fact: I have a great-uncle named Cigarette. A couple of generations back, the Hanagarnes were indeed full-blood Navajos, but today we’re so white you can go snow-blind if you stare at us for too long. Most of Dad’s family lives on a reservation in Shiprock, New Mexico. But by the time my dad was born, the proud blood of the People made up only a quarter of his DNA.

  This itty-bitty heritage never stopped Dad from attributing one hundred percent of his failures and successes to twenty-five percent of his bloodline. Navajo fierceness. Navajo boldness. Glossy Navajo hair that looks like a horse’s mane and is the stuff of shampoo commercials. Navajo thirst. Navajo diabetes. Good or bad, anything he can attribute to his Navajo roots is a win for him. His dream is that my siblings and I will bring our families to Shiprock one day to live in the mansion he’ll build. Picture the landscape from Mad Max. Now picture the rain from the movie Seven. Dip a paintbrush in a bucket of gray, the shade of the Modern Library covers, and paint the entire city. Now open the book The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression and upend it over the citizens. Now throw in lots of turquoise jewelry. And really good fry bread. That’s Shiprock. It always feels like it’s raining there, even when it isn’t. But to Dad, what matters is that the Hanagarne clan will be reunited on native soil and his children will embrace their heritage.

  Dad calls me awee, which he says is the Navajo word for the layer of congealed fat that sits atop Navajo stews. It actually means baby. But semi-fluency in Navajo is only one of my dad’s superpowers. His lineage gives him abilities that the X-Men would envy: “I can sneak up on a deer,” he says. “Not only am I beautiful, but I sing like a bird.” “I’m the only Navajo who can grow a beard.” “My advice is always right.”

  My parents didn’t really fight, but reading was a continual point of good-natured disagreement. Mom adored fiction. My dad couldn’t understand why someone would read a book about things that weren’t real. “Isn’t the real world interesting enough for you? I mean, the world we live in?” Dad would retort when Mom teased him about not reading.

  “I read,” he said. That was true. He just didn’t like the books my mom and I did. He was studying engineering at a local college and was more interested in practical titles like F-16 Tactical Maneuvers. When the two of them went to bed, they’d spend some time
reading together—she lost in the fictional world of a popular novel, and he reading about something useful by the light of her halo.

  Whatever their mild disagreements about literature, they were united in their adoration of me. They spent the majority of their free time teaching me, usually under the guise of playing games. My dad had less free time, so he couldn’t play as many games with me, but Mom was so fun that I didn’t notice the disparity.

  One day Mom and I were sitting on the living room floor practicing the fine art of recognizing shapes. My goldfish, Jaws, watched from his bowl atop the television. At age four, I was already wearing glasses, which were constantly bent. My mom liked to say that my three greatest talents were making librarians happy, sitting on my glasses, and reading. “Josh,” she said. She pressed a paper heart to her chest. “I love you with all my heart.”

  “Mom,” I said, peering through my thick, bent glasses and holding up a paper circle, “I love you with all my circle.”

  Most days included a trip to the library. I never had a chance not to love the place. My mom and I usually sat in the kids’ section, shoulder to shoulder on the couch while I turned the pages and read aloud from books like Tawny Scrawny Lion and Are You My Mother?

  I owned lots of books, but I usually had nearly as many checked out from the library. My mom often made this deal with me: “Josh, go outside and play for an hour and then we can go to the library.” I’d go outside and read stories to my dog, Topaz, and then we’d go to the library, where the librarians knew me by name. One morning after fifteen minutes of me shuffling my feet and sighing loudly as I followed her around the house, Mom cut me a better-than-usual deal: “All right! If you’ll go play outside for thirty minutes, I’ll take you to the library.”