Colony Club in Ambler, PA, once the home of the Ambler Public Library.

The Ambler Public Library was still housed inside the Colony Club at the corner of Ridge and Race Streets when I joined. I remember dark wood, hushed voices and sunbeams filtering down from tall windows, not unlike the church my family attended in the basement that doubled as a fallout shelter beneath St. Joseph’s School. My first library card was issued in 1960; not long afterwards, the library moved further down Race Street to a brand new brick and cinder block portal to the universe.

As a child, I read to escape the confines of a waning factory town. Unusual adventurers like the Borrower family and Miss Bianca were my companions. They took me far beyond a neighborhood of brick row houses built halfway between the factory owner’s stone castle and the piles of asbestos waste from the plant beside the railroad tracks. Back then, kids who played on the mounds didn’t worry when they came home looking like they’d rolled in flour. Back then, I wished I was one of them. I had to be content in the company of brave women, real and imagined, like Amelia Earhart and Nancy Drew, who helped me forget how lonely I was and how poorly I fit into my own skin. As I got older, I traveled into the desolate Yukon with Jack London’s characters and gamely tried to keep up with Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson as they solved mysteries with the power of deduction.

The summer after freshman year of high school, I was hired as a page at the newly renamed Wissahickon Valley Public Library. Now, instead of an hour-long weekly visit, I spent part of almost every day among books—sharing them, shelving them, or “reading” the shelves to keep the collection in good order. In the five years I worked at the library, I became devoted to Class 300 of the Dewey Decimal System. Shelf reading in the Social Science section, I discovered authors and topics that transformed my need to escape into a desire to embrace the world beyond my parish and my town.

James Baldwin taught me lessons about race relations. Studs Terkel’s oral histories put my parents’ stories of their depression childhoods into perspective. John Holt showed me a better way for children to learn. The brutal truths of the Holocaust and the war in Vietnam took away much of my naiveté. In the shadowy second aisle on the right, human nature was on display at its worst and most heroic. Instead of wishing for life to be fair, I began to search for justice. My twin desires to be a lawyer and a writer were formed and nurtured by those shelves.

Class 300 made me who I am, but my loyalties are expanding. Oh, Baby! True Stories About Conception, Adoption, Surrogacy, Pregnancy, Labor and Love, the anthology that includes my essay, “Becoming His Mother,” will soon be added to the shelves of the Bala Cynwyd and Upper Dublin libraries. The suggested Dewey Decimal number for the anthology is in Class 600, the category for books about People Using Science and Technology. There is a deep and abiding satisfaction in knowing this book will be on library shelves. One of the harshest experiences of my life has become a useful story for other parents.