Thirty-five years ago, the city of Amarillo, Texas, housed its city library in a four-story building that had once been the home of the Bivins family, founding fathers of a sort. Because it felt like a home, and not like an institution at all, the library was a place to spend Saturdays in luxuriant companionship with books.

The showplace homes from pioneer times looked much alike, though none was precisely modeled on the southern plantation mansion, all partook of its image -- massive concrete columns, wide steps on all sides, covered verandas, simple red brick walls, all shadowed by huge trees. In the Panhandle, trees grow only if nurtured and grow tall only if pampered. The library borrowed its grand entrance from the South, and with its double staircase, mahogany banisters, marble mosaic floor, and hanging chandeliers, it impressively introduced a child to libraries.

The library was a haven for quiet reading. Because it had been a home, the building offered a variety of little rooms, odds and ends, cubbyholes, each with its comfortable chair and reading lamp, centered on its Early American braided rug. The screened balconies on the fourth floor were special hideaways, right up amongst the leaves, and in the Texas panhandle the cool greenery of tall trees was a rarity. Only regular guests knew the fourth floor bentwood rockers with wicker seats.

By the time I was eleven years old, my best friends and I spent Saturdays going to the library on our own. Looking back, it is easy to recapture how special the whole day was. At 8:00 am we would gather at my house and walk ten blocks to the nearest bus stop. Being young was safer then and there was nothing dangerous about letting fifth-grade girls take the bus downtown unchaperoned. We always had lunch in the Silver Grill Cafeteria. Evenings, we would return by bus, weighted down by the dozen books we each checked out. For that, too, was a special part of the library visit. Unlike bookmobiles, the main library let us check out as many books as we could carry, and there never seemed to be an end to the books I wanted to read.

That love of books was undoubtedly fostered by the odd organization of the library itself. All the juvenile books were grouped together on the fourth floor, and someone with an elevated idea of juvenile interests had scattered Austen and Dickens and Cooper and Hawthorne in amongst the Nancy Drew's. Someone had placed Huxley right after Heinlein, Arthur Conan Doyle with Agatha Christie, Darwin's Autobiography with I Was a Teenage Nurse. No doubt there was lighter fare, but it stood little chance against the heavyweights that spiced the shelves.

When I was eleven, I owned no books. Yet I could go to the most elegant house I knew and make myself at home, browse someone else's book shelves. As long as I was well-behaved, properly respectful of the privilege offered, I could kick off my shoes, curl up in a rocker, and read undisturbed by household chores or little sisters.

Even then, I knew the old library was something special, though I could never have voiced my reasons. Later acquaintance with the sterile concrete boxes that masquerade as libraries has since made me aware of how much easier it was to meet books inside a kindly imaginary aunt's home.

Ten years ago I returned to Amarillo. I had casual intentions of showing my husband the homes I lived in, the schools I attended, the places I knew. The city and all in it were alien to me, but it was not a crushing realization, for I had left it long ago. Perhaps the fourth floor of the Mary E. Bivins Memorial Library was the one place I hoped to find unchanged, but, of course, it, too, was gone. Other buildings, none a library, stood in its place.

The new library is undoubtedly new.