Letter 03 — March 2026
Re: What the Library Gave You
Dear Soldier,
The Bull Run Regional Library in Manassas is not a famous library. It is a county public library that serves a Virginia suburb, which means it serves a particular mix of people — retired military, Spanish-speaking immigrants, suburban teenagers, elderly women who come for the quiet, children whose parents drop them off after school.
You were a Kenyan immigrant in administrative limbo, shelving books and helping people find things and being present in the careful way that volunteers are present — useful but not necessary, welcome but not employed. You probably did not think of it as anything other than filling time. I think it was more than that.
What the library gave you, without making a ceremony of it, was a model of what a public institution is supposed to do. It served everyone equally. The retired military man and the undocumented immigrant and the child with nowhere else to go after school received the same librarian, the same internet terminal, the same patience. This was not a small thing. You had come from a country where institutions frequently served some people more than others, and here was a county library that did not seem to.
I am not saying America is the library. I am saying you learned something there about what a community resource could look like, and it stayed with you in ways you did not notice until much later, when you were trying to understand what kind of person you wanted to be in the world.
The library did not save you. But it held you during a season when you needed holding, and that is not nothing.
From a man who still believes in public libraries,
Gabriel
mydearsoldier.com