Checked out from the Main

If you have tickets for a sold out talk by the woman who brings everyone in the East Bay together, you need to get to the New Parkway early. ● If you’re bringing kids to a talk about libraries as a public service, get there especially early to find parking and don’t forget the bag of books, pens, coloring pages, and toys. ● If you need a good, cheap meal for two kids on a Tuesday, the hot dog and the steak frites at the New Parkway will take care of everything. ● If the line is already out the door fifteen minutes before the door opens for Dorothy Lazard’s book launch, and your kids are still eating fries, wait until everyone’s filed in and then go find a couch in the corner you can all sit on out of the way. ● If you get popcorn to snack on but forget the water, do not try to subtly go out the side door, it goes straight to the kitchen; instead awkwardly traverse the theatre to the water and flavorings set up near the main entrance and retrieve cups and fill them, then crouch-duck-walk back so your children will stop stage whispering their thirst. ● If your kids are bored because they finished their books, remind them they can listen. ● Listen to Dorothy Lazard talk about how after her parents died, she and her sister moved to Oakland, and she often forgot her keys, so after school she’d go to the library and lay down on the floor and read. ● When fellow OPL user Alexis Madrigal asks her why she was drawn to the library, she says she knew it was important to be smart, and the source of smarts was in that library, in those books, and so was the key to mobility for a Black girl from St Louis. ● When Alexis, known tech blogger, asks her about the way that people use AI as a reference desk these days and what she thinks about it, she rolls her eyes, razzes her husband Gerald for asking Claude everything, and tells her pal on stage he should answer that. ● When she asks how many librarians are in the audience, more than ten people raise their hands (quietly because they know how to shhh, but the crowd gives them a rousing whoop because we know when to cheer). ● When the topic of freedom of thought and speech comes up, Dorothy says she wants everyone to get to read whatever they want, manga, porn, or whatever, just read, and she’s happy to report that she’s looked into it and there’s only one chapter of Moms for Liberty in the East Bay and it’s fairly moribund (Liam O’Donoghue jokes after that it must be in Piedmont. ● I look it up later: Contra Costa County, and in the wider Bay Area, Santa Clara and San Mateo each have one). ● When there’s only time for three questions from the crowd, the packed audience begs for more and the theatre employee in charge of getting everyone out on time grumbles that it’s our security deposit on the line, do what you want. ● When one of the questions circles back to the question of book bans, the querier, right in the front row, says she went to a talk at OPL by Maggie Tokuda-Hall, pigeon-painter, surveillance-opinion-haver, and president emeritus of Authors Against Book Bans, but it had been scheduled into a slot that she thought was going to be Dorothy speaking about her book, and what happened? ● And Dorothy gets a little choked up, says she heard second-hand that the library she spent her middle age serving had decided to cancel hosting her launch because they thought her book was harmful to the institution. ● That the head of the library had never even reached out to her, that she felt too rageful at this reception of a book full of love for the community and city of Oakland and the role of a library in this place—and all love asks for the objects of our affection to rise to being their best selves, to our aspirations for them, and to be treated well and valued for what we bring in turn—to go to the administration, asking them to reconsider. ● Dorothy’s strong voice and firm belief in libraries as places that serve everybody, which step in when other institutions fail to come through, where librarians help adults find jobs and help kids grow, is a voice any library should want inside their walls, unshushed. ● If you want a good library, do what Oakland does and vote 75 percent in favor of taxing yourself extra to keep all the branches open on Mondays. ● If you want a good library, keep a history room open and staffed to hold the city’s memories as waves of families wash in and out of time and place. ● If you want to raise kids who read, take them to the branch library closest to you and push stacks of books home with you in a tote swinging from the stroller handle. ● And if you hustle out to the lobby to talk to Oakland history enthusiasts who are researching Jack London’s oyster piracy years or who flew up from LA for this talk or are writing about the first Black graduates from Cal, and linger alongside in the snaking line of people waiting to chat with Dorothy and to have her sign their book, then send those kids who read to themselves now up to the bookshelves on the New Parkway’s mezzanine to keep finding new books, to keep reading—about crayons and Minecraft and gender nonconformity—whatever you want, kids, give me just a few more minutes, just keep reading.