Remember your first library? Remember snapping turtles?

My first snapping turtle book.

I once read that writing is theft. Surely much of it is just that; but even more of it is borrowing. We borrow our ideas from what we overhear and observe, what we read, the scent on the breeze, a notion that we get from walking through a new and different place. Then we return them.

The notions of theft and borrowing occurred to me this morning as I stood in my local library, in the magazine section, literally surrounded by a riot of points of view. What do the Muslims think about Christian terrorism, the Crusades and the Inquisition? They're still pissed, and it's right there in Muslim Sunrise. What do Hindus think about? Statues and a bath in the Holy River -- you can see the photos in Hinduism Today, on a shelf a safe distance away from the Muslims.  Did you know the National Review this month is caricaturing the Shepard Fairey Obama "Hope" poster by replacing Obama's face with Jimmy Carter's? Fiendishly and frightfully clever.

It's all at arm's reach.

What's a middle-aged man like me doing in the magazine section of the Mt. Lebanon Public Library on a crisp, sunny October Saturday morning, instead of wolfing down pancakes at Pamela's or biking the singletrack of South Park? I was actually trying to stock up on literature for a two-week vacation. My quarry was Daniel Okrent's book about Prohibition, Last Call. Long gone in my life are the days when it was easier to buy books than it was to read them. Two kids in college and a freelancer's salary have gently led me to rediscover the wonder of borrowing ideas ... and then returning them so that someone else can borrow them as well, free of charge.

The Mt. Lebanon Library displays its books enticingly, on carousels and vertical shelves, almost like a museum. How long will it be before it actually becomes a museum? With all three copies checked out, should I break down and buy a copy of Okrent's book? It wouldn't be a bad addition to my home library, which has a lot of history. Or should I download it to my phone and save some luggage space on the trip? More and more the e-book becomes the easy choice. When will the library start lending e-books? And when will the library just morph into iTunes?

I hope not soon, at least not until they figure out how to replicate the aroma of a library -- paper, glue, binding, and humanity -- in an online experience. For me, this scent is a Proustian trigger that urges me to explore the new and different. It takes me back to my first library, a neighborhood place on the edge of a blueberry farm in suburban Bellevue, Washington. At kindergarten age, we were allowed to cross the fields to check out books about insects, dinosaurs, snapping turtles and spaceships under the apple tree. I discovered the story of Minn of the Mississippi, a giant snapping turtle whose life spanned the continent from the headwaters of the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico ... places I'd barely heard of. We sat on the linoleum floor and browsed the lower shelves, checked out a stack (you could have up to six!) with our crumpled, hand-typed cards. As often as not, the hike to the library was a meander through a living world of dragonflies, frogs, salamanders, stink bugs and katydids giving life to the grassfields and drainage ditches of the pre-Microsoft Seattle area. Intrigued by the reality and life around us, we borrowed the ideas behind it ... and brought them back two weeks later.

What do the Muslims think about the Crusades, and what do the Hindus think about when they're decking themselves out with flowers and bathing in the river? And what do the Conservatives think about Obama's Hope? Do snapping turtles still traverse the Mississippi from headwaters to Delta?

The answer is probably just a short walk from where you live. Enjoy it while it lasts.