After fall was marked by tragedy, we asked you to share your stories about Stockton: Where you remember happiness. Where you seek help. Where you find peace. The ideas in this essay were among the many we received. What’s your Stockton story? Tell us here.
I spent much of my life in Stockton reading about strangers.
I began my career here as a library assistant, then became a children’s librarian. Some children I met were voracious readers. Others were just learning. Every chance I got, I would read aloud to them — books with characters from different places or with different ideas.
One book I had on repeat was Scribbleville by Peter Holwitz. It’s a picture book about a town of squiggly beings who resent the arrival of a straight-lined stranger. “Why would a man so straight and so slim,” they wonder, “want to live in a town where no one’s like him?” As I read, the children would listen, and wonder too.
Long before I worked for the public library system, the library had been a place of wonder for me. When I learned to read, weekly drives with my parents to the Main Library gave me access to more books. My own library card gave me a ticket to read as much as I wanted.
I began devouring books — whether it was Sylvester and the Magic Pebble or Little Women — and especially any book about children whose lives seemed different from mine.
The library wasn’t the only place my parents took me. We spent our summers in the Mayfair pool, or for a treat, riding the amusement rides at Micke Grove, or riding bikes until the streetlights came on. In the fall, in high school, I marched in the band on Sanguinetti Field at St. Mary’s. In December, Dad would drive us around Christmas Tree Lane to gaze at the beautiful lights.
To a child, Stockton was a place full of bright lights.
It was also a place where we were never alone. Every week, it seemed, my parents were volunteering somewhere to help someone with something: Mom leading Camp Fire Girls groups, Dad helping run the St. Luke’s church festival every summer.
Dad also did things in passing that, as a child, I never noticed. When he saw people in need, he might pop into McDonald’s to buy them a cup of coffee.
As I grew, rather than my parents driving me places, I started driving them. One Saturday morning, I got behind the wheel and drove my dad down Pacific Avenue, past downtown and toward St. Mary’s dining hall for his volunteer shift there.
We wheeled down the last block, and I had to hit the brakes for the crowd of children crossing the street to go into the dining hall. I couldn’t quite believe what I was seeing. I asked my dad, how could this be? They’re children!
He replied, in his soft, gentle voice, that they were homeless. “And they are human beings,” he said, “just like us.”
As an adult, I went back to the libraries I loved. I read to kids in the Troke branch, where I had gone as a high schooler. I worked at the Main Library when it was renamed for Cesar Chavez. I saw the Fair Oaks branch close and, thankfully, reopen.
Become a librarian and you will spend your life in search of answers: The definitive fact, the best author on the subject, the most authoritative resource. It’s a victory to connect each reader with exactly the right book for them.
But spend decades in the library, and you will also see many of our hometown’s greatest challenges.
So many children I met were struggling to learn to read. So many adults I met were struggling to survive.
At the library, for some years, we had a patron who visited almost daily and who was known for her outbursts toward staff and others. Though we had never met, I knew of her, and the library staff knew about her. They could tell that hers was not an easy life. No one really knew her story.
One day she was yelling right outside my office so I walked out and had a conversation with her for the first time. I addressed her by name, and asked if I could help. She stared at me for a bit and then said, “I know your face. You have a kind face.” Then she fell quiet and took a seat.
But I spent the rest of the day perplexed about this remark from a woman I had never met. At home that night, I called my mother and told her the story. I could almost hear Mom smiling through the phone as she replied. “She knows your face,” Mom said, “because you look just like your dad.”
My father had died several years earlier, but long before then, on many mornings, he had bought coffee at McDonald’s for the woman. It was something I never even knew he had done — but something she still recognized.
As a lifelong Stocktonian, I can say the city is full of stories like these. When a newspaper article notes that the Emergency Food Bank is almost out of turkeys for Thanksgiving, Stocktonians refill it within days.
I can also say it doesn’t take an expert researcher to see some of our problems. They’re multi-faceted and stubborn, and even the librarian in me must admit there is no one right answer.
Still, I can’t help but wonder if we Stocktonians are sometimes our own worst enemies. Some weeks, it seems easier to focus on the negative than celebrating the positive.
What if understanding one another, finding what we have in common, could be a step in the right direction? After all, a few years ago our hometown was declared the most diverse large city in America.
What if we spent the time really getting to know our neighbors? Would we see people who look nothing like us? Or would we, perhaps, see faces we recognize?
Not too many years ago, a middle-school-age boy bounded up to me in the library, shouting my name. I knew he had been an early reader years before.
I asked him, “What was your favorite book I ever read to you?” Without skipping a beat, he responded “Scribbleville.”
In the book, you see, the scribble people grow more and more irate about the straight-line man. Then one night, a child sits down and draws a picture from his imagination. It’s a house with just enough scribble and just enough straight. Soon, the other children draw the same.
The town’s grown-ups have never seen anything like it. They come to love these images they see in their children’s drawings. Eventually, the whole town has scribbles and straight lines everywhere.
“The town didn’t look like it once did before,” the book tells us, “and the stranger wasn’t so strange anymore.”
Suzy Daveluy spent 32 years as a librarian and later as director of Stockton’s Community Services Department. She wrote this essay for Stocktonia.
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