So, on the afternoon that America takes its first real steps toward transformation, and after I watched Obama stand before the world on a historic occasion and offer up phrases that might one day be etched in stone, I retreated to the public library to find more inspiration in other beautiful words that have already lasted the ages. And in the narrow book stacks I found the very Americans Barack Obama will need to revitalize this country.

Distractions from a two-year old boy named Hunter eventually led me to notice the people, a large number for a Tuesday afternoon, and not the usual library crowd. Hunter’s parents called after him across the study area. He hadn’t been taught library rules. He communicated in whoops and hollers to get his parent’s attention, and then used something like sweet talk in speaking to himself in a fashion loud enough for everybody to hear. When he was finally silent, he wove his way around the table legs. His parents called angrily again, “Hunter!”, but did nothing. Hunter and his close-cropped blonde hair would be cold when they finally walked him outside into the January snow, and the book shelves were finally silent. He made noise all the way through the library – sharp screeches dissipating until he walked out the foyer and finally to the exit.

I had my back turned to the fiction racks. An older woman walked with as purse under arm through rows with large print, science fiction, mystery and straight fiction books were, straightening her glasses, inspecting spines but not kneeling or pulling anything down from top shelves. She was there for leisure reading, but she wasn’t the only one without serious intent. Some men in baseball caps sat at computer terminals – one was with his wife and they played video slot machine games (even computers are infiltrating libraries and threatening to be a more engaging sources of entertainment).

Libraries are no longer safe havens from more popular past times. The movie and music shelves are as diverse and expansive as the book collection. I looked around and didn’t see anyone reading, and it was then that I realized that nearly everyone was conducting serious research. The cubicles along the walls were filled with blue collar workers searching for work. The men were surprisingly hard-edged, more like mechanics than scholars, chains dangling from back pockets, worn blue jeans, taking care with books down about car repair. The ladies were older, not yet at retirement age, and I felt a sorrow for them that they would be here using the Internet to conduct job searches rather than reading whatever they liked while living on retirement accounts – but then I figured they would be reading the wrong things.

These people are the America that Obama needs – the men and women who will do the smaller things in our country to bring about the hope he speaks of. Hope is a word he championed in his reelection and that he nearly made his own. Americans from the middle state outward to the coasts, heard him say in town hall meetings and factory tours that hope needs to be restored beginning in the White House and through to America’s most common workers. Hope has now become a commodity that America expects him to deliver despite it subjectivity. Hope can not be packaged. Hope can only be pointed to and more often than not it promises to happen in the smallest ways, with American families and corporations making the decision to dissolve what Obama has called the “me first” mentality. These typical Midwesterners in the library, like myself, have benefited and been defeated by that perspective.

Above the library’s din, a train whistle from the after-lunch cargo train sounds as it approaches the downtown intersection. Sweet is how it sounds, higher than the coughs and clearing throats, footsteps and pant legs rubbing together, polite laughter in office conversations, and keyboard clicks from the terminals along the wall. I may leave this place to watch the trains. The weather is below freezing and the snow is being spit, but at least there is motion and the rules are different. Passing trains are allowed to loud, there are no rules for them in regard to volume. The whistle sounds loud as it passes by the lowered crossing arms. Hunter, if he were to stand at the intersection and scream, would be drowned out by the velocity and noise. In Washington, he’d be free to shout as loud as he wanted for his new president. But not in the library – there should be strict rules there, and more hope. I walked out with D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love under my arm.

The sidewalk rises as it comes to the library’s west side and turns south at a 90-degree angle. From that place, pedestrians, day or night, can look down on the puzzles, stuffed animals and rounded tables in the children’s section. A small reading room for periodicals can also be looked into with its long, wide table and reading chairs. Celebrity faces stare back from the wall along with joggers mid-stride and African woman framed by the familiar yellow square from National Geographic covers.

The library after hours is one of the few places that is no more calm after hours than it is during the day. Hushed voices that usually belong to patrons, it could imagined, become the whispers of the writers who fill the empty aisles with soaring, lyrical words. I have been a reader my whole life and yet, year after year, I still manage to find books on the shelves – some classics – that I’ve never discovered before.

Last year, it was the works of the beat generation oddly timed with the 50th anniversary release of On the Road. From there, my tastes turned to Jack London, whose book The Road had been an influence on Jack Kerouac’s work. Next, it was a round of writing instruction books, including Stephen King’s On Writing and some by lesser recognized writers who told about the craft (and psychological) benefits of memoir and journal writing.

From there, I rediscovered a writer whose books about mountain climbing was supposed by critics to be a modern day Dharma Bums. My first experience with Daniel Duane was the beautifully written Caught Inside. His El Capitan and Searching for Mo returned me to The Beats and the latter day, beat-influenced bohemians, the Merry Pranksters, and the man who wrote about them and their acid experiments, Tom Wolfe. And so, I felt as though I’d climbed up and down and back up again the branches of.a literary family tree.

I took Caroline to the library tonight to pick up some books I had on hold. While she stacked blocks and fit advanced puzzles together, I wondered at all the knowledge and emotion on the book racks, in the trays of CDs, between the thin, leafy paper covers of the magazines. What books are on the shelves now, I thought, that I’ve walked past that I will read one day and find something that will change my life in some way?

Tonight, it was Wolfe’s The Kandy-kolored Tangering-flake Streamline Baby. In the introduction, he writes about an assignment he was given to cover a car show only to find the story he delivered was not what he wanted to write, and not the real story at all. This book of his collectrd stories was the genesis of hom writing the way he wanted to. In his voice. I can relate.

in my opinion, though they are located across the street from each other, the library is no less holy than the church and vice versa. Both are filled with people wanting to be wiser and live better. And, story telling is a centerpiece in making believers.