If you read the Wednesday edition of The Mount Airy News, you already know that this is Library Card Sign-Up Month, and naturally, area librarians are encouraging local folks to get a card.

“It’s the very best card one could ever have.”

That was the statement from Anna Nichols, librarian at the Charles H. Stone Memorial Library in Pilot Mountain.

While that’s quite a statement, I tend to believe she’s right.

I first fell in love with libraries when I was a child. I think my initial experience with them was during my first grade year, when we’d make the weekly trek to the second floor of my elementary school for story time and to check out books for the week.

I would like to tell you it was a great, wonderful, life-changing experience. In truth, the story time was nice, but I didn’t really get anything out of it beyond that. I wasn’t much of a reader at the time, so getting a book to take home for a week wasn’t any sort of thrill.

My parents, though, took that little book I’d bring home every week and, quite frankly, changed my life. They made me read aloud every night, just a few pages. It was a struggle, because I hated reading. And I’m sure there were other things they would have rather been doing, but almost without fail, every evening, they’d sit me down in the living room and I would have to read to them.

After a couple of years of this I figured out something — reading really was, to borrow a cliché, fun. Once I arrived at that conclusion the forced nightly reading sessions stopped because I was reading all the time on my own. I would get all the books the school librarian would allow me to take home. It didn’t matter what — history, science, fiction of all sorts — I just wanted to read.

The summer I was 10 was a special treat — I got my very own card from the local public library. Every couple of weeks I’d go there, and in my little kid mind it was one of the most magical places I knew. Outside was hot and loud, inside was quiet and cool. And there were books — more than I had ever seen anywhere.

Later on in my teen years I would spend hours upon hours at the library, leafing through old records for little kernels of information about my ancestors. It was quite a thrill to pick up a book that contained the hand-written accounts, or at least copies of the hand-writing accounts, of my own family, their names, where they lived, what they did.

I felt for a while that there was nothing you couldn’t find at the library.

Those early library experiences — coupled with my parent’s dogged determination that I would read — ultimately set my course for life n many ways, and has now passed down to another generation. My kids go to the library a couple of times a week and they come back with two bags full of books, as well as a few movies, books on CDs, and all sorts of other little goodies.

When I was a kid books were about it. There was no Internet, no DVDs, believe it or not no VHS movies, no CDS...wow, it’s sounding like I grew up in the dark ages.

Now, in addition to thousands of wonderful books of all sorts, there are hosts of other materials to be checked out, not to mention Internet computers and, at least at the Mount Airy library, even games for patrons to play.

All of this for free, which brings me back to the statement Nichols made from the Pilot Mount Library.

“It’s the very best card one could ever have.”

I don’t know that anyone could argue with that statement. If you don’t have a library card, whether you’re an adult, a teen, or a child, there’s no better time to get one.

John Peters is editor of The Mount Airy News. He can be reached at jpeters@mtairynews.com