I read on today’s Writers Almanac this quotation from Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird: “Instant information is not for me. I prefer to search the library stacks because when I work to learn something, I remember it.”

The library stacks … I remember them well. Mine were at the old University of Kentucky library, where I went to research “bureaucracy, the fourth branch of government,” my paper topic for a high school class, Advanced Government and International Relations, taught by Colonel Coleman. (I can’t remember his first name; and was the Colonel a military term or a Kentucky honorific?)

He was an inspiring teacher, and I plunged into the research for that paper as if it were cool water on a hot summer day. It was refreshing, liberating. Hours flew by as I took notes on index cards. 

I made many trips to the library, then wrote the paper longhand and typed it up the old-fashioned way — on a typewriter with Wite Out at my side. It was more than 40 pages, and my friends never stopped ribbing me for the comment, in red ink, at the end: “A scholarly study,” Colonel Coleman had scribbled. 

“Oh yeah, it was scholarly all right. It put him to sleep!” they laughed. 

Maybe it did. But it woke me up.