A Personal Library Story

I am going to tell you a short personal library story, an elevator speech for why you should have and use a Magic Library Card. I grew up in a blue collar neighborhood in a busy area of northern New Jersey. Not just blue collar, but somewhat rough too, and not well integrated racially. A neighborhood of two overlapping cultures, mine being first-generation, white born-Americans. There was sharing of space, at least at the margin in which I lived, but separation anyway, economically and culturally. I say rough, because I have, for example: walked by drunks lying curbside (a different way to read “curbside” from books being distributed curbside at the library); passed a man, a body actually, lying on a gully bank, a crap game site, with a weapon left behind, in him actually; witnessed a m…