Librarian Thoughts...

I've been working here over two years, and I've learned about the quirks of humanity.  I have learned that my coworkers (like Miss Kate) can be highly unpredictable, supportive and jovial. I've learned that the public is a rioting, crazy, insane mess and we can't control it once it walks through the door. The public, as a communal beast, tends to be cranky, whiney, self-centered and a pathological liar, but there are some parts of it that are worthwhile. The rest of it is a disease magnet.

But most of all I've learned, when the public runs out of people to complain to, they assume that the people their taxes pay are the replacements.

Yay for being a public servant.

Differences

This morning broke bright and early and loud with birds. It is spring in my little town despite the thirty something degrees with spitting snow that hit us Saturday. And today it got up to sixty something with a cloudless sky and a strong willed breeze.

I spent the morning luxuriating my way through pork and cooked apples with brown sugar, played a few senseless games on the computer and rejoiced in the fact that after a rather lengthy period of being sick and weak, I was enjoying nourishing food made by my own hand, once again.

Around one o'clock I decided that I was bored enough to make work sound like fun. I put on my cap and some good work clothes, grabbed a water bottle and headed out into the glare of sunlight. It was perfectly pleasant and I put my back into digging up, raking, molding and reshaping my small vegetable garden; tossing out the stones, collecting the clay, making it ready for the planting that should happen late April/early May.

When I stopped to grab a sip of water I would turn toward the house and see my three-year-old, black furred monster staring at me with vibrant yellow eyes, meowing through the glass. I worked until the main plot was done and my trenches dug.

 

 



It looks a little like badly dug grave. I was tempted to put up a grave stone. "Here lies the garden, which will rise from its rest sometime in August." Or maybe just a cross made of sticks, and let the obnoxious neighbor kids wonder.

But I had other fish to fry.

Last year I planted the beginnings of a flower garden behind our garage. Long, long ago that prime sunlit space was reserved for an herb garden and a stone path and several other niceties. We even had a pond. In point of fact this garden space above used to be part of a waterfall that started at the red pump and cascaded into a small pool of its own. But I like it better as a garden. Easier to take care of.

So, too, is my 'flower garden' in the back. It needed some weeding and sorting so I worked my way back there and first tackled the bent over, sagging, broken backed mess that used to be a lattice supporting morning glories.

They do well in the summer...

But by the time windy fall and snow heavy winter has passed, they are a dried crumpled heap leaning over and breaking apart the lattice.

This year they were heavy enough to topple the cinder block that I was using to support the post that was tied to the lattice.

All winter I have been pondering a better way of letting them climb, while not spending money and having it be..."me".

I'm so proud of this thing. I made it! I sunk the feet of it about three inches into the ground and I'm hoping that the tri-pod-esque base will distribute the weight of the plant and maybe make some interesting photos once the flowers bloom.

A good friend of mine, after seeing this photo, has determined that the 'evil' morning glories will take it down without a problem. I'd like to the think the amount of time I spent pounding crooked nails in with a hatchet will count for something.

I couldn't find a hammer.

So after my Morning Glory Oil Derek went up I tore the weeds out of a patch of nothing then played a game of find the lilies.

I planted these Asiatic lilies last year and they bloomed right about the start of July. A month later the blooms had fallen off and all I had was tall, beheaded stalks. But here they are, all five, growing away. I could swear that some of them have migrated since last year...

I had planted some other things back here the year before but I didn't see anything else that looked more like flower and less like weed. I was tired and about ready to call it a day anyway so I began to clean up the yard.

After a quick run to the store I was able to put spinach leaves, frozen berries and soy milk into the blender and I took my yummy smoothie (not a health freak, just happen to appreciate smoothies, as they save time) out into the yard.

I walked around a bit admiring the plants and trees, some of which have been in our yard since my mother and father planted them over thirty years ago. We have a patch of pine trees and a giant honeysuckle bush/tree. A few oaks and one maple tree. In the back I was pleased to find my rhubarb growing strong after the last few days of rain. A few more of those days and I'll have my first harvest.

I stood under the old white pine, enjoying its shade and the natural wind chimes of the breeze in the needles and the wind coming in off the farmer's field that backs up right against our property.

My next door neighbor had been out all day too, which is his routine on any day that ends in 'y'. My neighbor, Mr. Forester, is the Mr. Monk of lawn care. On hands and knees with scissors going after crab grass. Cuts the bushes with level in hand to get perfectly straight lines every time. He has two dogwood trees, precisely eight feet apart, with trunks centered in a perfect square of grassless dirt. His garden is a rectangle in which he plants the same crops, in perfect straight rows, every year.

He has bushes and some flowers around the front of his house, and one large shade tree, and grass. Thick, green, manicured, rolled, weed free grass.

There are none of these in his lawn...

I can remember Mom telling us expressly not to mow over these for fear that they wouldn't come back up. Not that I intentionally mowed over them, but on the rare occasions that I accidentally did, they clearly didn't seem bothered at all. And they only grow under the shade of the maple tree.

A little splash of beauty in our slightly rustic yard that simply doesn't exist next door.

I stood at the back of our property, peering around the end of our neighbor's wooden slat fence, staring at his squared, over treated, boring yard eternally grateful for the dappled, dirt worn, crooked, stick strewn, patchy glory of my back yard.

The more I stared at his geometrical landscaping the more I realized that, in total opposition to my own feelings, he probably LIKED his yard that way. After all he spent every waking hour out caring for it.

I would be perfectly unbothered by his peculiarities and be able, even, to enjoy them a little if it weren't for the fact that he had been forcing his yard care beliefs on my family for decades. But a small amount of the old bitterness was wiped away by two things. First...I don't care what he says, I like my home, outside and inside, and I will improve it as I see fit. And second...though I've never felt envy for his yard, ever, I did feel sorta sorry for its dullness today.

I think I should sneak in some night and plant something. Smack in the middle of the yard. Like a cactus. But a nice flowering cactus. See what he does.

As the beautiful day continued I took pity on the monster and allowed him a little time outside, keeping very close tabs on my otherwise 'inside' cat. He explored for a frolicking ten minutes before signalling he was ready to go back in. And of course five minutes of 'in' time and he was meowing to go back out again.

Didn't happen.

I was delighted though and I'm looking forward to more great planting days in the future. In the meantime I'm still thinking about my neighbor and his infatuation with his yard and wondering...is there some way to bond the rift that has existed between him and my family since before I can remember?

Maybe a friendship cactus isn't so far fetched an idea?

I may be grinning impishly now but, if they were a way to make peace between our two households, I hope it comes during the growing season.

Fire

I lit a fire today. It's been a rough, tough couple of months and someone that I am tertiarally familiar with passed away. Work has been less and less desirable and in the meantime I've basically been without energy and sick in some way or other since January.

Today was especially tiring and after taking a long nap or two I decided to enjoy our first spring storm with a cheery fire.

On the one hand, bad idea. Part of my on going health battle has been a week and a half old headache that makes my eyes especially sensitive to light. I couldn't do a disco, I barely managed the fire.

But while I was squinting painfully into its homey light it reminded me of a bunch of fires.

The Snowman Island Fire

My little sister and I, back around the time of middle school, would often end up at the college campus where my father taught, on dreary and boring summer afternoons. We played in the classrooms drawing on every black board, pretending that the room was a submarine, or the USS Enterprise. Or explore the campus and the woods surrounding it.

One particular afternoon we had a bag of apples, some matches, and a pocket knife. We headed out down the creek that runs through the campus, clomping over familiar rocks and deer trails and hopping across small runs of water that collected either side of sandbars. Each of those sandbars were islands, and of course we named them.  One of those sand bars was a large patch of stone and sand that looked suspiciously like a giant snowman.

We were hungry by the time we reached it. We hunted for sticks and pine needles and dry weeds and piled it all up on the sand bar and found sticks for the apples and lit the fire, then ate roasted apples all alone out in the wilderness.

A 12 year old and a 9 year old. I'd like to see a 9 year old do that these days!

The Mohican Trail Fire

Some time in the middle of college, after I had started to save the stipend I was receiving, and after the roommate that disgusted me and the old friend that delighted me became girlfriend and boyfriend, I suggested a hiking trip. We were meant to go about two hours south of campus but ended up two hours west. I was driving, the lovers were napping in the back.  I pulled the smoothest redirect that I could and went north and we ended up, four hours later, at a state park that should have only taken thirty minutes to reach.

But we made it.

Then I got us lost by leaving the trails. We walked briefly down some back country roads and trespassed in a couple of fields, headed down a steep and slippery valley full of giant granite boulders, then finally found our way back to the trails.

Then we built a fire! I had bought some food and we worked together to gather sticks. But we really didn't have a good starter. So I burned a shoe box that was in amongst the junk in my trunk.

Then soaked to the bone we all went back to my roommate's house and my old friend burned a sock on her wood burning stove.

The Underpass Fire

When things at school became too much to handle, I had many less-than-constructive bad habits to turn to. But, one of the good habits, involved walking off campus (at all hours...) and up to the overpass that spanned more of the same river.

Sometimes I brought food with me. One time when I went with a friend, we scarfed some of the corn that was lying in a plowed field just behind the college.

The rocky decline on one side was perfectly shielded. I don't know how many bikes, footballs, tennis balls, socks, hoodies and beer bottles I saw there. But the underpass also captured organic material and there was always an excellent collection of drift wood.

When my friend and I went down we roasted the field corn. On my own I might have a can of spaghettios or beans. I would sit and smoke a cigar, or write something, or just listen to music. I would listen to the cars whispering by underneath and just take a step back into time.

The Bad News Fire

I was sixteen, getting ready a week in advance for the trip I would be going on once school ended. I was headed for Cali to join up with a song and dance tour exploring the South Western United States. I was in the back yard, burning old paper trash from my room when I heard some cars pull up in the driveway.

I was mad, for some reason or another. Or maybe just melancholy from watching old reports and drawings and story starts burn up. But for whatever reason I had no interest whatsoever in going to see who had just arrived.

Ten minutes passed before two of the ladies from my church ventured back to the burn barrel. They were acting like someone had died. They wanted me to come inside. They said, "Your father needs you."

I knew I didn't want to have anything to do with the hands on powwow they were preparing me for. It couldn't possibly be good news. And to this day it sorta irks me that Dad couldn't have just told me the news instead of 'inviting' someone I barely knew to do it.

But that afternoon I was told that my mother had left, she had disappeared over night leaving only a note on Dad's pillow. She wanted a divorce.

The minute I could get out of the house I ran up to my (then) best friend's house. We talked, I was upset but I didn't cry. And on the way home there was a thunder storm.

Other Fires

At camps, at reenactments, in other parks or on trails, at home, at my uncle's home, once using steel and flint, even fake fires!

It has always been a part of my life, a talent that worked hard to earn, and bright beacon leading to many, many memories. Shame I couldn't enjoy today's memory.

Water (Living Or Otherwise)

I passed by a church on my walk tonight. This church has been in my hometown for a while, and been in my life for all of it. My best friend's father became the pastor after a man that our family lovingly called "Grampa Straiter" stepped down. Since then the church building has housed several different faiths, including the Baptists it hosts now.

The building is simple, white, and small, and even though it has changed and expanded over the years, it is still nothing more than a couple of rooms. Next to it is a long brick building that hasn't changed at all.

I remember being little and getting delight out of being the one to suggest the next hymn. I remember I would always suggest "The Old Rugged Cross". Not necessarily because I liked it, but because my Grammy did, and even if she wasn't there, we might as well sing a song that somebody liked.

I remember standing in the bright sunlight of an Easter morning, on the black top in front of the red brick building, decked out in dresses that Mom made and eager to get to the sunrise breakfast that would precede the service.

Or being in the youth group and spending the better half of the evening getting rug burns in a hearty game of dodge ball.

Or attending summertime VBS and making crafts, some of which I still have.

Everyone in the church, but for my family, was elderly. That's part of why we left.

Eventually even so aged a crowd managed to out grow the building and our old church raised money and built a building outside of town where they still hold services.

Since then I've been to a million churches.

But my walk carried me past the church's doors and I noticed that the lights were on. It is, after all, the Friday before Easter.

I walked up to the doors and peered through them, listening to the wailing and weeping and gnashing of teeth going on inside.

Then a little three year old child came running up to the veranda style doors that lead to the vestibule and pushed her way through them, making a beeline for the standing water cooler tucked into the corner.

No one came chasing after the child and she seemed perfectly contented as she moved the trash can away from where it stood, propping the doors open, dragged it to the cooler, and started fishing discarded water cups out of it.

Then, with no understanding of communicable diseases or the dangers there in, she proceeded to fill, and drink from, every single cup.

Following this fearless fete came the passing of water from one cup to another before it went into her mouth. And the occasional moment when she would either dump or spit water back into the trash can.

She finished her performance by meticulously seating one cup into another until she had a stack, then dumping them back into the trash can and returning to the sanctuary. No adult noticed. No adult went after her.

I didn't think of it then, but I hope now that God protected the poor girl from disease and sickness and that someone, somewhere down the line will teach her to do otherwise.

What I was thinking of at the time was very different however.

I was thinking about Easter.

About Jesus pouring water that turned to wine.

About Jesus pouring wine that turned into the mark of a traitor.

About that traitor leading Jesus to His arrest and capture and ultimately to His crucifixion.

About how we call Jesus the Living Water...and about a certain woman at a well.

And about how often water is used in the Bible, primarily because it is so absolutely necessary to life.

And how a room full of wailing, moaning, convulsing adults was nothing compared to the simplistic testimony of a little girl getting complete fulfillment from a cup (or more) of water.

Kinda like the adults wailing in D.C., making noise and calling it a fight for freedom. When the true freedom is as simple as taking a drink of water.

I dunno...

Happy Easter..

Broken Glass

I went to my old high school today. It ceased to be a working school building shortly after my youngest sibling graduated, I think.

I've been there plenty of times since it was remodeled, but never really down most of the halls.

A lot of it has changed.

The senior hallway was rebuilt so that the Board of Education could use it as office space. Most of the rest of the classrooms are being used by the Senior Activity Center and a couple other organizations, including a chapter of a tech school. But today the building was mostly shut down but for the old cafeteria, which hosted a hoard of students preparing to participate in a charity run.

I was there for moral support and to meet up with a good friend of mine who is, and was, a teacher at the old high school and, now, the new one.

I got there early. Not one to hang out in a flock of teenagers if I can possibly avoid it, I ventured down the halls that still existed, a little surprised that no one had seen fit to pull the lockers out yet. The first hall was the 'science' hall.

As I walked down it I remembered that the first door on the right was the classroom for one of my favorite teachers. He had a Mr. Roger's meets Bill Nye The Science Guy quality to him. And I did a lot of diary and note writing in that class...not necessarily because of the teacher. Mostly because there were days when I got done with my work quickly and decided to do other things instead. I also remembered that the only violent outburst I recall happening at my school happened right there, in the hall. And the science teacher had to step in and seperate the boys.

Another room to the left was the room where I took anatomy. It was one of the few classes I liked because it was hands on, and I could stay awake better, and the time didn't drag, if we did hands on things. I was always good with my hands. We got to dissect rats in that class as our final project, and since I had the only pregnant rat I got to 'give birth' to the babies with everyone watching. I learned two things that day. One of them was that I wasn't nearly as squeamish as most of the other people in the room, and that I was a kinetic learner. I learned more from dissecting that rat, than I did from a whole semester of lectures.

Up the hall on the left were more room doors. At least one of them I was sure didn't exist when I went to school. But on the left was a room that I knew very well.

The computer room.

I took computer class and journalism there. I remembered the typing tests we did at the start of every class, and that my best friend and I always sat beside each other, both because our last names were together on the class list, and because we wanted to be side by side when we took the test. Both of us had typing speeds upwards of 90 wpm, often breaking 100 wpm.

Journalism was different. I got into the occasional bit of trouble with it. Mostly I hated magazine layouts, loved typing out spoofs for the April issues, and for a brief time made a total mockery of the horoscope portion of the paper. I think I was my biggest fan then.

The hall ended there, becoming a new wall that someone had put up to finish the offices for the Board of Education. I doubled back and headed down towards the band hall.

The best place. Past the place where the stairs used to be that would let you go to the basement classrooms. Rooms that had been torn down when the high school moved, mostly because of the incipient mold that grew everywhere.

I turned down the hall and I walked very slowly down the first set of stairs, past the locker room entrances. I felt the pock marked, painted brick walls; leading to the double door entryway that I almost didn't want to see, for fear that the room was no longer there.

I stepped into the door well and jumped. Someone had set up a dummy right inside the door and it was dark enough to make the expressionless face lifelike.

Sixteen years ago, it had started. Even before I became a high schooler. I had been in love with the marching band the day my family attended the State OMEA competition. We sat in the stands eating peculiar sandwiches that my father had concocted and watched as the band thrilled us.

My brother, in the percussion section, was all snap and flare and military precision; and when they were done and the judges started handing out the prizes, our boy (and a hundred other teenagers) won, receiving the highest possible rating.

The next two years, while I labored away in junior high, I spent the weekends helping the marching band at competitions and games.

Thirteen years back I was a freshman. Finally allowed to be a part of the band. A part of the big kid club that I had been longing for so very long. And better still I was there with my big brother. The hero of my life. Every day of that year was fantastic. The band did great, and I, a clarinetist, was confident and excited and fully dedicated to the work.


Twelve years back and I was a sophomore. I hated school, hated life in general, saw my family going down the tubes, and had lost the small amount of guidance that my big brother had provided me. But when band was happening I was happy. Even if it was a little scary. I had only had the preparation of my freshman year of concert band on the trombone, and now I was the head of the section, along with another newbie, a former flautist.

Eleven years back I was a junior, not quite as sure about leading my section, but giving it my best shot. I had just had an argument with my divorced mother and was in a hurry, late getting to rehearsal. I rushed into the horn storage room, grabbed my trombone, then tripped over the slew of empty cases cluttered in the narrow room and went face first into the lip of a baritone case.

A moment later, on hands and knees, I found myself staring at a puddle of blood collecting on the tile beneath me. The assistant director came in, helped me stand up and mopped up the blood. But busted nose or not, the band was the only thing I wanted to do that night, and working around my swelling lip, I went out and marched into the dark, evening hours, with seventy other kids.

Back about ten years I was a senior clomping down those stairs at a few minutes before eighth period, grabbing my beat up tenor trombone from a case labeled "The Big Monty" then rushing my section back out the door to line up for pregame formation on the practice field. And keeping a watchful eye on the clarinet section, where my freshman sister was just beginning.

I had decided then that I wanted to be a music teacher. I got the chance to direct a few times and I was given the "Director's Award" at our banquet at the end of the year. Not quite the "Sousa Award" that my brother got but...

I stood today, outside that room, sniffing at the dust that was choking the concrete hallway, wishing I could go in there, just one more time. I knew the trophies were gone, and that my old band teacher wasn't going to be in his office. That I wouldn't see the plunger that my brother's class got for the teacher, with "That Crap Don't Flush" burned into the handle. Nor the cymbal that the percussion ensemble signed or the myriad of other bits and pieces that had sparked so much into what was otherwise a lifeless high school career.

One of the students that was participating in the run started down the hallway and I decided salivating on the band room door was unseemly. I continued down the hallway, down past what used to be the shop class room and to the health room door. Down near the band entrance was the old wall mounted heater and I perched against it for a bit.

The old high school wasn't what it used to be. Not hardly. But those two hallways alone had brought back so many ghosts of memories, so sharp and strong. Memories that crowded out other ones.

My family is scattered now and relationships aren't what they used to be. I don't have the friends I had then.  But in that brief walk it felt like I was watching the shattering of glass reversing it self in slow motion. All the little scattered, microscopic pieces returned precisely to the position in which they belonged without a gap.

Some people say our memories are deceptive, but I disagree. I think our memories now are as wonderful or as awful, as our present was then.

Like watching a reverse of glass breaking. The glass is always perfect in the end.

Bookless Libraries

Some...okay well, part of one....of my works has been published recently on a website that, as I understand it, intends to become a magazine. I was the first person that the editor contacted which made me feel special up until I started reading all the other works that he was starting to compile and well...now I feel kinda sad and lonely and vastly under-talented in comparison with the others...

The site is called Site Unseen and it's unique, certainly. More than anything I've started looking into the blog that the editor has included and I'm learning things from it. But this morning my hackles rose just a little when I read yet another article about an encroaching storm known as paperless technology.

http://unseenfiction.com/2013/01/18/bookless-library-a-reality/#respond

The above link will take you to the specific article. I encourage you to read it first before getting to my commentary below. And from the above page you can of course explore the other authors that have been featured on the site and hey...! If it makes it to the stands, buy the magazine!

Here is the response that I started typing in the 'Leave A Comment' section, before I realized that my comment was more than three paragraphs.

First I am a librarian. We see a standard collection of people day in and day out.

When I look at that photo of the prospective lay out for a 'bookless library' I cringe. What I see, in between the pretty pixels of that image, is a collection of the worst of what we get in the library every day. And I do stress that this is the 'worst', and not necessarily, the 'only' patronage we get.

The first thing I see is a row of teenagers navigating around any excuse for security on the computers and finding illegal download sites for games, music and pornography, and anything else they can take advantage of thanks to the free Internet that most modern libraries now provide.

Off in another corner, where they are alone only by virtue of no one else daring to be near them is the massive swelling, seething beast known as the homeless and chronically unbathed.

Children, men, women, teenagers, older persons. All of them with their own weird, and sometimes lethal, quirks, all of them with their own foul and oft 'turpentine' strength stench, spending four to eight hours of their day watching YouTube videos, posting funny stories on Facebook and updating their blogs. And none of them, and I say this from experience, not one of them actually using the Internet to search for a job.

Yes there are those that come in and use the computers briefly to print, because they haven't got printing capability at home. There are some regulars that use the computers for writing projects, research, or some of the many historical or educational resources that they have free memberships to thanks to their library patronage.

But the the main, and ultimate, attraction of computers in a library today is free Internet.

We only have eight computers. We're a small town library. Imagine how much worse it gets in bigger towns, cities! Megacities!

I never do see the homeless people in the stacks. Rarely do they actually take a book off the shelf and open it up. The chairs we have stationed around are rarely ever used because there is nothing effortlessly entertaining sitting in front of them. If they are used it is by the homeless so that they can catch a quick nap.

The only person who does move from the computers to the stacks and back again is so blind that he has to hold the book less than a few inches away from his nose in order to read.

No human being could stand to be that close, and the computer screen is wiped down every day thanks to our certainty that he is the main source of colds and flues in our place.

Maybe I sound a little harsh but when your everyday health expectation lies in the hands of people who can't be bothered to bathe, blow their nose, or cover their mouth, and especially when you know that people who never set foot in the library when they are healthy, are guaranteed to come out to grab materials if they know they will be home sick for several days, you quickly lose appreciation for them.

So now they want to put these disease ridden, smelly, loud, rude, self-entitled and self-centered people into a tiny building with row after row of super close stools with nothing but germ-collecting surfaces between them!? And they say this is our bright and shiny future!?

We're not even touching on the population that is sixty and over. Many of whom don't have an e-mail address because they are so afraid that if they turn on their computer it will immediately be attacked by viruses and identity thieves and they won't be able to protect themselves from the big scary Internet!

Most of this age group will come in hoping to pay a bill online armed with nothing but their bank debit card and a stack of scrap paper, with wavering scribbles covering them. These 'notes' that they've taken are ultimately useless because the person who helped them the first time, usually a grand child, didn't bother to explain what they were doing, or teach their grand parent how to do it themselves. They just did it.

I have met fifty year olds that don't know what a mouse is for, forty year olds that don't know how to 'hunt and type'. Thirty year olds that can't spell 'Google'. Twenty-somethings that have to ask for my help because they can't find their e-mail. I.E. "I typed yahoo into the thing and I got here!"

Here turns out to be a Google search for the word 'yahooooo'.


And these are not people that I would have placed in the learning disabled category. These are people that work for a living in a small but real world where computers just don't exist beyond a cash register and a hand scanner.

Granted I live in farming country, but even I am shocked at how technology has disappeared for some Americans.

So, bookless libraries. Please...give me a break. Those aren't libraries, those are Internet cafes. Only the sign says 'no food and drink', instead of 'come in and have a coffee'.

By the way, whatever the sign says, they will still bring in picnic lunches.