KEY POINTS:
She was probably in her 50s, but I was pretty sure she was 100. I was probably 8, but pretty sure I should be 14. I was on a mission.
I had recently decided that picture books were for wusses. I would walk into the library each week and go straight to the thickest-chapter book I could find because - well, now I could.
I was eyeballing which was fatter, Ben-Hur or the letter M of the encyclopaedia, when the librarian crooked her finger, summoning me to her desk. She leaned forward intently, her shouldered cardigan like a cape, and bore down at me over her half-glasses.
"I've been thinking about you," she said. She reached underneath her desk as if she was hiding a time bomb, but instead pulled out three books rubber-banded together with a note that had my name on top.
"This," she began in a whisper, palming the first cover as if she was touching the hood of James Bond's car, "is an adventure you will never forget until the day you die."
Her choices were a wonder. She had read me perfectly.
From then on, I would pretend to peruse the shelves, secretly hoping that her nail-polished finger would call me back to the new possibilities she kept under that desk.
When I told this story to Anthony, a librarian who sat to my right at the Auckland Writers and Readers Festival one morning, I said only, "I'm so grateful to her", with more emotion than I realised was there.
He knew it well, and smiled. He recounted how every Friday night in the small South Island community where he lived years ago, a farming woman would drive into town and fill her bag with a dozen Mills & Boon romance novels, week after week. A colleague mentioned the woman had a good mind.
Before she arrived one Friday, Anthony gathered a bag of books for her, Doris Lessing, Nadine Gordimer, Garcia Marquez. He wrote a note explaining why he liked each one. When she came in that evening as usual, he offered the books.
On Monday morning, the phone rang. Anthony told me, "Something must have clicked." She had read the Gordimer short stories. She wanted to make a special trip into town that day to meet him.
Over coffee, she asked him why he did it. She began to cry, "I live in a man's world. I have three sons. No one has taken an interest in me like that before."
Anthony told me quietly, "I am a librarian because I believe in what we do."
Today he heads the Palmerston North library. He sits on boards now where they talk about KPIs, Key Performance Indicators. "How does that woman in that South Island town fit into a KPI? It's working at the human level, in a person's soul. It's about opening doors."
Anthony and I would compare notes between festival sessions; opening doors to minds we may have never met. For one weekend, someone had just put the right books in my hand again.
I wrote: There is a direct correlation between the spreading of democracy and the spread of modern-day slavery, 75 per cent of the fish we eat is illegally fished, and there is more money made on fake Viagra than heroin, according to the research of economist Loretta Napoleoni. That was just my first hour.
I wrote: According to biographer Simon Montefiore, up until recently Putin occupied Stalin's old office. When bored, he runs his fingers along the spines of Uncle Joe's books and pulls out a volume at random to read Stalin's handwritten notes in the margins. It's an image I'm not sure I want to know.
I wrote: Blind author Ryan Knighton travelled to a church in Germany that is playing a John Cage composition, "As Slow as Possible". It will take 639 years to be played. He had come to hear just one note change. When Ryan entered the churchyard on the arm of a local boy who had guided him there, he cried. I found it strange that I was taking notes in the dark.
When I walked out of the Aotea Centre on Sunday night, I was too shy to tell Anthony I owed him a debt. His passion echoed the memory of one wise woman who knew how to read my cover at just the right moment.
The Writers and Readers Festival reminded me that I had forgotten something important. It's not enough to know that wondrous ideas are out there; it's the luck of having the right stewards to navigate.
My caped crusader behind that big wooden librarian's desk was right. Maybe that's part of "the adventure you will never forget until the day you die" - the people who show you the way.
