Who will be raising the next generation of library lovers?

Three days a week, I would hike down Shawsheen Road from Andover High School and report to my station in the basement of the Memorial Hall Library .

Awaiting me there were piles of factory-fresh books: Best-selling novels with alluring titles and evocative covers; flimsy paperbacks; stern history tomes in faux-leather binding; and cheery, slender picture books. My after-school job for the next three hours was to reinforce, wrap in plastic, stamp, glue, emboss, and otherwise prepare each book for its debut on the library's shelves.

On days that I finished early, I was expected to go up to the stacks and "shelf-read": Follow book by book across a shelf to make sure each was in its place according to the Dewey Decimal System.

Actually, more like the Dewey Dismal System. I would find the farthest corner of the library, where the 100s were kept and no one ever came by , sit cross-legged on the floor, and struggle to understand the words of Plato, Kant, and Kierkegaard. What a way to be a bad girl!

It was a day in my very first paying job, but my umpteenth time in a library.

I have an early memory of my mother dropping me off for story hour. I was 3 years old at the Flushing branch of the Queens Public Library in New York, a six-block walk from our apartment. I felt so grown up sitting there, cross-legged on the floor, while a librarian in a dirndl skirt peered around the edge of a book she held open to face the children .

Later, when I was 10 and we were living in Andover in a house with a yard, we got a puppy.

I trained him myself to come, sit, and stay, using instructions from books I borrowed from the library. One book said to put treats in your pocket and your dog on a leash, and when he wandered away from you, pull him gently back, repeating "Come! Come!" until he was by your side and could receive his reward.

I had to adapt these instructions. Nicky wasn't going anywhere as long as there were treats in my pocket. So I taught him "Stay" first, wandered away from him, and then called "Come!"

It was a lesson in doing it yourself and not believing everything you read, both courtesy of the public library.

When I was a new mother, the libraries in Arlington and Lexington were weekly destinations, places to watch the guppies in the Children's Room fish tank, glimpse the hamster snoozing in the empty paper towel spool, and sit with other moms, cross-legged on the floor, toddlers in laps, the librarian leading a rousing rendition of "Open, Shut Them."

Today, I don't need the library to teach me how to read, train a puppy, or prepare my children for school. But I still need it for research, or when I want to linger in a cozy place with a book, unconcerned about overstaying my welcome.

What I didn't understand as a child, but understand now, is that as much as I need the library, the library needs me, needs all of us, even more.

Libraries, housed as they are in those grand, venerable buildings, are deceptively vulnerable. Dependent on taxes and charity, offerings for the libraries contract when the economy sours and don't always expand when times improve. And while libraries are edifices to the great American values of free speech and thought, they are subject to our collective ambivalence when those values back up against others, like security and municipal frugality.

At midlife, I know there will come a day when it won't be so easy to sit cross-legged on the library floor. But with such rich memories of libraries and a future of memory-making ahead, I hope to be as good to libraries as they've been to me.

I volunteer and try to pay more attention to news about libraries and issues that affect them.

These days, when news pops up of a cash-strapped public school system needing to cut school librarians to balance the budget, I wonder: Who will raise the next generation of library lovers?

Once, on a visit home from college that included a swing through Andover's Memorial Hall Library, I confessed to a longtime librarian, the one with the perpetual twinkle in her eye, that I used to shirk my shelf-reading responsibilities in favor of a little Plato.

"We knew what you were doing," she replied. "We thought it was great!"

Long live libraries and their merry conspiracy of shirkers!

Jeri Zeder lives in Lexington and serves on the board of the Cary Memorial Library Foundation.