Library Wary

Our children have a rich and diverse tapestry of obsessions and neuroses. Given their parents, one needn't ask why. L's are somewhat understandable and age appropriate. A year or so ago she gave up Elmo and in the last few months has taken up a passion for Ariel of The Little Mermaid fame. Were Ariel a real person, she would have some cause for concern; there's a decided stalker-like quality to L's love and devotion. You kind of get the impression that L might just grow up to be one of those people who give Jodie Foster all that trouble. Ariel is a frequent subject injected into any of the most unaffiliated conversations. She's honed that eagle-eye she first developed in the Elmo years and can pick out a microscopic Ariel image on a piece of marketing at a thousand feet. (With much shirt tugging, pointing and "Look Daddy! Look!," I might add.) A number of times she has mentioned going to the beach so that she can sing to Ariel.

N's current Xanadu: the Harbor City Library.

N's flirtations with OCD, however, are a little more one-of-a-kind. His current flavor of overarching obsession is our public library. Yes, I didn't mistype that. He is fixated on our library. He talks about it constantly. I mean CONSTANTLY. I will come home from work and give my usual quiz:

Daddy:	N, how was your day?
N:	Good!
Daddy:	What did you do today?
N:	N go to the libewwy.

This will illicit that ubiquitous side-long glance over to Stacy, where she will give her typical eye-roll that translates to "I don't know where that's coming from; we didn't go anywhere near the library."

Whenever I take the kids our for a walk, the library is always N's suggestion for a destination. Guess that's not too out of our slightly skewed norm -- L had a particular gate at a gated community entrance that she had to go see every walk for a year or two. The other day Stacy related to me how she was out at Trader Joe's with the kids and the guy at the check-out asked N his name. N thought for a second, smiled and said, "Libewwy." The checker-dude rolled with it. He addressed N in polite conversation as he finished ringing Stacy up, always referring to him as Mr. Library.

I'm choosing to look at all this as an early indication of a life of scholarly and academic pursuits rather than early onset of severe bibliocentric compulsive disorder. N may end up being a distinguished journalist or researcher, or one of those rare, insular American Nobel-prize winning authors. He might just be prepping for his future job as Librarian of Congress. Yes, that is how I choose to interpret this. Everything will turn out just fine. Really it will. Nothing to be concerned about at all. I'm not going to obsess over it.