Growing up my parents didn’t have much, but what they did have—no matter where we lived—was a library.
Hand-me-down furniture, pots, pans, cutlery, and other kitchen miscellany found on our neighbors' stoops would come and go—discarded as easily as they were discovered—every time we moved. And we moved often.
But as wobbly chairs and half-functioning toasters were left behind on the street—perhaps for some other hapless family to obtain—we would lovingly pack milk crates filled with books into the bed of my father's old, blue, rusted-out Toyota pickup, like literature-filled mega-blocks or a real-life game of literary Tetris. The library was never left behind.
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