Oh, how the mighty have fallen...

I am fortunate enough to live in a city with a pretty dang terrific public library system.

There is a fabulous main branch in a gorgeous old building near the universities, and a number of smaller branches all over the city. The collection is expansive and what one branch does not have, another does. If no branch has a book you want, the ILL department will get it for you, usually at no cost. Until recently, no fines were charged for kids’ materials, and the fines were something insane like 15 cents a day on adult books. Just this year the fines went up, and they began charging fines for children’s materials. I can’t blame them in the least – the budget woes are enough to make a library patron weep. So now fines are something like a quarter a day for overdue books, and they charge for all kids’ materials, which, since I live with Mr. Oh-was-I-supposed-to-return-that-book-sometime-this-year? (and I am not talking about H) means I frequently fork over large amounts of cash to my appreciative librarians. But it’s all for a good cause, which we use with astonishing frequency and almost always successful results. If I didn’t have this amazing library, I would buy way more books than I already do, which is saying something.

Our closest branch closed last spring for renovations. It seems renovations turned into gut the whole dang building and start from scratch, and it’s STILL closed. It’s scheduled to re-open this summer, but unless the plans include al fresco reading rooms, it doesn’t seem likely.

The next closest branch is a lovely library. It’s a smaller collection than I am used to, but it’s in a beautiful old building, and it has a huge, sunny children’s room with a nice train table and some arm chairs where my kids can play while I steal a few minutes in the grown up stacks to find something to read. The staff there has welcomed the closed branch’s clientele with warmth and enthusiasm, and while they won’t hang onto my holds for me until I can show up to get them regardless of the date I am SUPPOSED to pick them up (oh, Suzy my Favorite Librarian, how I miss you), they are happy to hold them a day or two longer if I call specifically.

But: here’s the catch. (There’s ALWAYS a catch.)

Theat next closest branch is in a not so nice part of town. A part of town that I am, quite frankly, not entirely comfortable driving through . A part of town in which I make absolutely sure I have locked my van doors. A part of town in which, were I unfortunate enough to have to live there, I would not be comfortable throwing my kids outside to play all the time the way I do now. It LOOKS fine. It usually IS fine. Except when it’s not. It was the epicenter of the gang activity in the 1990s, activity which has seen a renewal and increase in the past year or two. And this past weekend, an elderly woman, a local resident, was shot by a 15 year old boy, who was trying to shoot someone else who had shot one of HIS friends last year. He was firing an illegal (but of course) handgun off a railroad trestle into oncoming traffic and managed to hit this woman who was walking home from the library.

My (city-born and raised) husband has never been especially happy with my decision to go to this branch, and take the boys there. He lived here in the early ‘90s and remembers all too well the cesspit this neighborhood was.

My argument has always been, But we live IN a city. Things can happen ANYWHERE. And while there was a shooting just outside my house last Labor Day, on a beautiful sunny summer day when my boys were riding their bikes in our alley, you can somehow rationalize even that – after all, to not rationalize that event means selling a house and uprooting a family from a community and friends and schools…but this. This I can change. We don’t HAVE to go to this branch. Even though I feel fearful and hopelessly, glaringly middle class and, and, I admit it, WHITE, letting this scare me off.

We can travel a few more miles up the road to another branch, in a more upscale, fairly wealthy (and admittedly predominantly white) neighborhood. Where some horrible things have also happened in the past few years, but none quite so random. None that couldn’t be avoided by watching my kids closely and not walking down the street at 10pm and …I know I am rationalizing. But the thought of me ignoring my husband’s concerns, and ignoring the news reports of this innocent bystander dying at the hand of an idiotic teenager with access to illegal firearms, and endangering knowingly my children, who are my life, my heart…I can’t do it.

The only one agonizing over this is me.
Just so you know.
I’ll bet the library staff almost expects its white clientele to hightail it up the road to the next branch, and I think that is what’s bugging me.
I don’t want to be that person.
I don’t want to be that person, so one of my boys doesn’t grow up to be that person.
And yet it’s for my boys that I am becoming that person.
Once again parenthood has managed to turn my perception of myself on its head.