I have a guest card at an academic library within old person walking distance of my home. Recently, I asked the student attendant at the front desk sitting next to the computer to check out a book, and, retreating, she bashfully replied, “Just a moment, please, sir. I don’t know how. This is the first time I’ve ever been asked to do that. I’ll get some help.”

I was struck dead. Melville tells the story of a man leaning on his second floor windowsill whom people didn’t know had been struck dead by lightning till they touched him. That was me paralyzed at the front desk.

I looked down at the 1999 copyright book I had extended to that girl with two hands like an object of some value. The arthritic spine cracked like a gun shot when I opened it in the silence of that 9 a.m. library ghost town, a shot directly into my memory banks, and out leaked the spindly frame of sixty-ful Miss Barrow, spinster librarian of the Our Lady of Prague library in my Lansdowne hometown, where the story of St. Sebastian’s arrow-crowded body modeled a possible end to the profession of Faith we young ‘uns made.

And out leaked a picture of the warm, inviting, twin-gabled old and original Lansdowne Public Library nestled out-of-the-way, just over the commuter train hump that isolated this little piece of Elizabethan park from the city-center chaos, and where this young teen learned about life from mastodons to masturbation.

And out leaked a memory of combating the tedium of my overcrowded and intellectually slothful high school by hunkering down in class behind the broad championship rower’s shoulders of Mike Flick and reading on my own such mind-engaging classic novels as Theodore Dreiser’s “An American Tragedy,” with its grim lessons about growing up in our rat-race urban society.

And out leaked the sight of the tiny library on the first floor of my dorm building in the tiny college in rural Maryland where I challenged myself to have my name on every white index checkout card in every snug white envelope pasted inside every American literature book’s back cover in those pre-computer revolution days, so that future students for all time would know “Gallagher was here” and held the record for literary consumption like it was a hot-dog eating contest.

And out leaked a mental pencil sketch of my fourth generation past ancestor Patrick who was forced to close his school books at age 10, having made his First Holy Communion, the act that served as working papers in his Shenandoah patch neighborhood in those grim 1860s, and disappeared into a coal mine and disappeared from history.

And out leaked a conversation with Betty about naming our first son “Dewey Decimal.”

And out leaked my death in an Orwellian bonfire fueled by my own large personal library and carried out by my own plug-eared grandchildren wearing baseball caps turned backward.

Sweatily, as best I could at age 85, I danced the 1950s bunny hop home, finding strange solace in knowledge that people in nearby Nazareth, Pennridge, and Central Bucks school districts still recognized the power of books enough to ban or consider banning them.

And rejoicing that right here at our Bethlehem Area Public Library six times a year for many, many years, hundreds of people have bought thousands of books at their marquee book sale. A mini-Mardi Gras on Church Street publicly celebrating the book. A distinctive community ritual of which to be proud.