Beyond These Words

As the Undead Roam the Stacks - A Library Halloween Story

2011-10-17T07:41:00.000-07:00

I stood in the 780s staring at a row of books that according to the card catalog didn’t exist. Martial Arts for Paranormal Crime Fighters the first title read. Karate for Shapeshifters, Kicking Zombies Back into the Grave, and the reportedly bestselling Vampire Hunting in Stilettos: the 21st Century Chick’s Guide to Dealing with the Undead followed.

I’d discovered the books only the day before. Karate for Shapeshifters ran 330 pages with illustrations. Fully indexed, with a table of contents, even the title page looked legit. Printed on good quality acid free paper with a sewn binding; they didn’t make them like that anymore. I looked at the spine; Dewey number 758.132, karate with paranormal content, which without reading the book seemed to be correctly cataloged. If the books were a joke, it was a pretty elaborate one.

I peeked over the mezzanine railing watching the well dressed business man browsing through the mystery section. His three piece suit and Italian leather shoes made him suspicious. No one came into my library looking like that. But his gleaming white teeth precipitated my mad dash to the mezzanine and search for Vampire Hunting in Stilettos. Sharp fangs sparkled when he smiled and they didn’t come from too much flossing.

Three floors below the elevator began clanging, its morning ritual as it cycled through the building’s floors. It sounded like a swarm of drug doping bees lifting weights. Behind me the elevator arrived on the second floor. The rollers, flattened from infrequent use, thumped rhythmically as the doors opened.

“Finally,” a female voice said from the elevator. “I just can’t get the hang of pushing those buttons.”

Medium height, her grey hair pulled back in a tight bun, a pencil stuck out of the woman’s bun like a sword strapped to her back. Her white, pleated, high-collared, starched blouse buttoned up to her chin, a large silver Celtic knot broach held it closed at her throat. A long black skirt hung to her ankles, black leather oxfords peeping out from beneath it. The fact that I could read the elevator buttons through her torso was just a little disconcerting.

“Good morning, Emma” I said.

Her eyes flicked across me and glanced around the stacks, gazing lovingly at the books. “Really Jen,” she said, “I wished you’d get rid of that thing. Librarians don’t wear,” she hesitated. “whatever that thing is in your nose.”

“It’s a stud,” I said.

“Right, librarians don’t have studs in their noses. Or tattoos for that matter.”

“Yeah, and they don’t roam the stacks sixty years after they died either,” I said. The wolf tattooed on my forearm dug its claws into my flesh. It didn’t care for the Ghost of the Librarian past. Or maybe he was afraid I’d slug her, I wasn’t sure.

“Well, in my day,” she sniffed, a sound I’d only read about people making in novels, Victorian novels to be exact.

“This isn’t your day anymore,” I cut her off, not wanting to hear the same lecture about appearances from Emma that I got from the library board every day since I’d taken the job.

Emma had been the first librarian to ever preside over the Library. She’d been hired straight out of library school in 1890, the year the library opened its doors. She’d ruled the place for 60 years, finally dying at the circulation desk in 1950 at the age of 82. She’d fallen face first into the ink pad, the date stamper clutched in her hand. Rumor had it her last word was “shhhh.” Like the book in my hands, they didn’t make them like Emma anymore. At least that’s what the library board said.

She peeked over the railing, looking at the business man in mysteries. Her pale gray eyes flicked across the room settling on a spike haired punk standing by the video games. She sniffed again. “Vampires in mysteries, zombies in the whatever those things are,” she added pointing at the game display.

“Don’t forget this one, “she said pointing to a book at the end of the shelf. The Superhero Librarian’s Guide to Saving the World the title read. “I found in invaluable in my day, especially when the undead start roaming the stacks.”

I pulled the books off the shelf and rose to carry my stack down to the desk. The elevator doors opened behind her, and Emma stepped into the elevator. “Oh, and dear,” she said, “I keep the cape in the file cabinet.” She smiled at me, “You’re going to need it.” The elevator door rolled closed in front of the Ghost of the Librarian past. “Happy Halloween,” she called as the elevator descended back into the basement.

The Feral Librarian

2011-08-17T14:13:00.000-07:00

The Feral Librarian

She sits,
tongue hanging out,
shreds of cloth from devoured patrons stuck between her teeth;
the patrons who used books as hot pads,
who turned down the corners of pages to mark their place.

Her eyes dilated,
search the room for the next victim.
Her nose twitches sniffing the air;
smelling for fear,
misshelved books,
the scent of those who dunk their books in coffee,
or use them as spaghetti plates.

She’s on the hunt.
Beware.

by Priscilla Berggren-Thomas

Ben and I were playing fetch at the library this morning. Actually, I was crawling around on the floor trying to convince him to run after the toy I’d just thrown, while he was trying to chew on my hand, as he was sure that made a much better chew toy. Ben is my Golden Retriever puppy, one in a long line of dogs who have shared my life and kept me sane. It’s true that most days I prefer dogs to people, especially at the end of the day when I need someone to lick my wounds and make me smile.

Prior to becoming a librarian, I actually attended seminary. It’s tough being a dog lover in seminary, where you are supposed to be dedicated to loving humanity. All those soon-to-be pastors looked askance when I let it slip that I really preferred dogs to people. But a dog’s mind makes so much more sense to me than a human’s does. And there’s a good reason for that. You see, I was raised by wolves. Well, maybe not wolves exactly, but an assortment of dogs; mutts, Golden Retrievers, Irish Setters, Newfoundlands, Great Pyrenees, even a Border Collie. They taught me about being part of a pack and how to keep all the human angst in perspective. They are also probably the reason I’m a librarian and not a pastor. A feral librarian maybe, but a librarian none the less.

I’ve learned a lot from dogs. Like Finn, my first Golden, taught me about the importance of sticking with your friends. He was eight weeks old at the time and we were driving across Wyoming. Both Finn and I had to go, but Bruce was behind the wheel and kept putting off stopping. That’s when Finn crawled on top of Bruce and peed on him. I’d been married to that man for five years by then and hadn’t managed to get him to stop the car when I wanted to stop. Finn in a matter of minutes worked a miracle, because even if Bruce could ignore me, he could no longer ignore the dog.

Finn also taught me about perseverance. He loved refried beans, and if I wouldn’t feed them to him, he’d just help himself. It didn’t matter if the can was unopened. He could pick out which can had refried beans in it. He’d get it down, puncture hundreds of holes in it with his teeth, squeeze it flat and eat all the beans as they oozed out of the can. I’d come home to little tin disks laying on the floor, all that remained of the once whole cans of refried beans. I’m not sure there’s anything I want quite that badly, but when I do, I think about those little metal circles and that dog’s powerful nose and jaws.

Finn also taught me about letting people know when enough was enough. We used mouse traps to teach him to stay off the counters (in an effort to curb his refried bean habit!). We also hung them from the Christmas tree to keep Finn away from the tree. It worked for about a week, and then he decided to teach us a thing or two. I came home from work one day to find the mouse traps all pulled off the tree, two of them totally chewed up, five branches chewed off the tree, about six ornaments had been eaten and all the water drank out of the basin. Finn lay in front of the tree with a look of “I showed you” written all over his face.

Needless to say, when I first read Marley and Me by John Grogan, I thought Marley had nothing on Finn. But by the end of the book I had to admit, it would have taken three of my dogs to create all the havoc Marley did. I think that’s one of the reasons we love books like Marley and Me. They help us feel like we don’t necessarily have the worst dog in the world. Finn did have to repeat dog obedience. He loved carrying his own leash, which made the instructor furious. I thought it was cute, which made her even more furious. Come to think about it, maybe I was the one who needed to repeat Beginner Dog Obedience.

Books like Marley and Me also help us remember all the love and joy and yes, lessons that come into our lives with a dog. John Grogan started a trend. Once he wrote the adventures of Marley, our need for dog stories caused an outpouring of writers’ tales about their dogs. Celebrity authors like Dean Koontz got into the act with A Big Little Life a story of his Golden Retriever. Judith Summers wrote about her Cavalier King Charles Spaniel in My Life with George. Ed Breslin wrote Drinking with Miss Dutchie about his Black Lab who helped him with his struggle with depression and alcoholism. And Jon Katz wrote about his troubled Border Collie in A Good Dog.

Of course, everyone always asks if the books have sad endings. I’m afraid most of them do. Their about dogs and even if they live long sweet lives their lives are shorter than ours. They almost always leave us behind.

That’s why I have Ben, because J.J., the Newf, and Dexter, my old Golden, are both over thirteen years old. Their days with me are measured in months now, rather than years. Ben is here to ease the pain and to give me new stories and lessons. And he’s in training to be a reading dog at the library, which might help us all be a little less feral.

Don’t try this trick at home

2011-06-08T13:05:00.000-07:00

The locust bloomed last Tuesday. I swear there wasn’t a blossom in sight on Monday, but when I drove home Tuesday evening, the valley was covered with white sweet pea-like blossoms. And the scent! When the black locusts bloom, I think this must be heaven. It’s enough to make me believe in aromatherapy. Just like the way the sun slants through the library’s windows made me finally decide there might be something to feng shui.

Our senses have such a strong impact on our moods. Scents that trigger memories of places we’ve been, the way light plays across a room triggering feelings of happiness or sadness, the spiritual experience of a great meal. We forget sometimes, wrapped in words and thoughts, about the fact that we experience life not just with our head, but our body; not just by what we see, but what we taste, smell, hear, and feel. The best writing transports us to another world for that very reason. It stimulates our senses, inducing a cascade of emotions.

For me reading is like a reality show that starts with the disclaimer “don’t try this at home.” When I read good writing, it seems so simple, so easy. I think, “I could do that.” I mean after all their just words strung together to tell a story. But then I try it, I realize I’m at the “See Dick run” stage. The beautiful descriptions of Dick’s long colt like legs stirring up the dust as they lope across the school yard, just don’t come that easy for me. I can’t think of what to compare Dick’s freckles to, other than – well – freckles.

Those beautiful twisty, curvy metaphors take work. Like Wallace Stegner’s “Floating upward through a confusion of dreams and memory, curving like a trout through the rings of previous risings, I surface. My eyes open. I am awake,” from Crossing to Safety. And I can feel the night coldness when I read Sharon Shinn’s line from Mystic and Rider, “She liked the deep stillness of an untenanted night, the pervasive cold that seemed to take corporeal from and lean against her like an affectionate child.” I want to write that line!

And it’s the details that count – not that Dick ran, but how he ran. In the opening paragraph of Brad Kessler’s Birds in Fall he doesn’t say they plane was in trouble, he writes “We were eighty minutes into the flight. Orion on our left, the bear to the right,” and I’m there looking out the plane window. Or in Three Bags Full by Leonie Swann, she describes a flock of sheep discovering their dead shepherd, “The shepherd was lying in the green Irish grass beside the hay barn, not far from the path through the fields. He didn’t move. A single crow had settled on his woolly Norwegian sweater and was studying his internal arrangements with professional interest,” and it isn’t any dead shepherd or scavenger, but a very particular shepherd and professional crow.

And there are those incredible first lines that keep you reading. “The best day of my life happened when I was five and almost died at Disney World,” Libba Bray starts Going Bovine (what a title by the way!) And continues, “I’m sixteen now, so you can imagine that’s left me with quite a few days of major suckage.” Or John Green’s “The morning after noted child prodigy Colin Singleton graduated from high school and got dumped for the nineteenth time by a girl named Katherine, he took a bath” from The Abundance of Katherines and he’s hooked me. I need to know about a guy who’s dated and been dumped by nineteen Katherines.

Yes, I keep trying to do these tricks of writing at home, and I keep reading these lines, hoping I’ll someday write one as good. It’s just a lot harder than it looks.

The Uninhibited Reader

2011-04-22T13:56:00.000-07:00

I’m reading a book called Naked, Drunk and Writing. It’s one of the glories of aging that I no longer feel a need to hide the cover when someone asks me what I’m reading. Age lets you shed a few inhibitions and writing requires that you do. Not that I am naked, drunk and writing, you understand. But being willing to not pull any punches always makes a writer’s prose better. It’s like the fantasy novel I’ve been working on for years now. It got better after I stopped trying to keep my protagonist from killing anyone. It’s a fantasy after all. The bad guys have to die.

It’s also why we love memoirs, I think. The willingness of an author to bare their life and soul on paper is like picking at a scab. You just can’t stop going back and doing it. Or, in the case of the memoir, reading it. Whether its dumb choices, crazy addictions, or bad marriages, we love when people expose themselves, warts and all. Not just because we live in a voyeuristic culture, but because we want to learn from other people’s self exploration. We want another’s soul journey to help lead us, or embark us, on our own. Of course, there are some stories that are more soul bending than I can handle. People are always asking if I’ve read Lucky by Alice Sebold, but I have to admit Sebold’s story of being raped and left for dead is just more than I can handle. I feel the same about Mary Karr’s The Liar’s Club. I know its great literature, but I just can’t manage to get through it. I’m afraid I want my soul exploration with a side of humor.

Little Heathens: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm in during the Great Depression by Mildred Armstrong Kalish is much more my speed. Kalish and her siblings antics growing up on a farm are fun to read. Plus is really makes you appreciate the ease with which we can have a chicken dinner in this day and age.

I’m partial to stories of spiritual searches outside of a particular religion. Barbara Brown Taylor’s memoir Leaving Church, the story of her giving up her work as a Episcopal priest, is a favorite of mine. She continues the story of living spiritually outside of a church in An Altar in the World: a Geography of Faith. Sue Monk Kidd’s feminist awakening in Dance of the Dissident Daughter was me a life changing read for me. Her follow-up, Traveling with Pomegranates, a joint tale by her and her daughter, may not be quite as earth shaking as Dance, but as a reader it was great to be able to tag along on their journey. Mystery author, Nevada Barr’s spiritual autobiography, Seeking Enlightenment Hat by Hat is told through the hats she wore to different churches.

I love memoirs by writers about how they became writers, or stayed writers, or try to write, or pull their hair out writing. They’re usually inspiring, funny, and well written. Stephen King’s On Writing is one of the best. I can still picture him writing over a hot dryer as he worked in a laundromat. His realization that he wrote more when he had a menial job than when he had a professional one, still sticks with me. Lisa Scottoline’s and Anne Lamott’s reflections on life, including their early writing careers, were great reads for someone who wants to write. You can read about that in Scottoline’s Why My Third Husband will be a Dog or Lamott’s Traveling Mercies.

I’m always looking for new memoirs to read and I have to admit I do judge books by their covers, or at least their titles. Why else would I be reading Naked, Drunk, and Writing? It’s the funny ones that catch my fancy. That’s why the following are all on my to-read list: I’m Sorry you Feel that Way: The Astonishing but True Story of a Daughter, Sister, Slut, Wife, Mother, and Friend to Man and Dog by Diana Joseph; Animal Magnetism by Rita Mae Brown; Seeking Peace: Chronicles of the Worst Buddhist in the World by Mary Pipher; Confession of a Counterfeit Farm Girl by Susan McCorkindale; Hit by a Farm: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Barn by Catherine Friend; and I Loved, I Lost, I made Spaghetti by Guilia Melucci. Unfortunately the list grows longer and longer and time, alas, grows shorter. So I better get reading!

Directions

2011-03-14T10:37:00.000-07:00

I’ve been ruminating on how instructions and directions are given these days. While Bruce and I were in England last May, we kept driving around a lot of traffic circles, or round-abouts as the British like to call them. Partly because there’s a round-about ever mile or two in England, but mostly because once we got in one we just kept going round and round trying to figure out where to get out! And even when we did finally get out, we were usually heading in the wrong direction.

In England road signs just didn’t say what I was expecting them to say. To start with, they were usually right after the turn, which wasn’t quite enough warning for us. They also rarely told the road number or the direction. Instead there was an arrow and the name of a town down the road. It wasn’t always the next town, or a very large town, which meant it often wasn’t on the map. So the signs really didn’t help if you had no idea where you were going. They were designed for people who already knew where they were.

Instructions are often like that too. They are written by people who already know how to do what the instructions are designed to tell you how to do. As I see it, that means instructions and directions are written for people who already know how to get where they are going, or how to do what needs to be done. They aren’t written for those of us who are lost or learning. I like to think of us as the explorers in life, but maybe we are just the terminally clueless.

This all came home to me when I was downloading the Adobe software needed to be able to check out the library’s downloadable media. I followed the directions from the online catalog and a window popped with a choice of selections. I could check “authorize software now (strongly suggested)” or “use software without authorizing (you can authorize later).” Authorizing required having an adobe account, which I didn’t have, so I decided to download and authorize later. Of course that was a mistake, because even though I later went in and created an adobe account and authorized the software, it wouldn’t work. It seems to me that it really shouldn’t say “authorization strongly suggested,” when in fact it won’t work if you don’t authorize as you download. The message should be more like “listen up; you need to do this now!”

Sometimes, I wonder if we are so concerned with having a choice and not sounding like we are commanding someone to do something that we can’t bring ourselves to say “you have to do it this way.” “Should, have to and need to” are some of my favorite words. As in “you should, I have to and we need to.” A friend told me once “Priscilla, if you didn’t say ‘should’ you’d have nothing to say at all.” So, I’ve been trying to be good and not ‘should’ all over myself and everyone else. But really I’m beginning to think there are times when we just ‘should.” It’s like watching college students run around in tee shirts in zero degree weather. I think about saying “wouldn’t you be warmer in a coat?” And then I think what I really need to be said is “put a coat on!”

So here’s my ‘should’ for the day. If you are downloading the Adobe digital editions software to use the library e-books, Adobe may ‘strongly suggest’ you authorize the software at the time of downloading, but I’m saying you “should, have to, must” do it. It’s not a suggestion, it’s a requirement. Otherwise it won’t work!

A Room of One’s Own

2011-01-13T05:53:00.000-08:00

I’ve always wanted to live in a house that had its own library. In England last May, we visited loads of estates and country homes. It was the libraries that fascinated me; huge rooms lined from floor to celing with book shelves, cozy nooks, window seats, and overstuffed chairs to curl up in. Ladders lined the walls so you could climb up and reach the books up by the ceiling, which was always a good twelve to fifteen feet up. If you grabbed a book, you could hide in a corner, curled up in a chair, facing a window that looked out across the gardens, the moors, or the sheep fields. Virginia Woolf wrote that “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction”. It’s not just for writing fiction though, or even just for women. Everyone needs a room of their own; a place to curl up with a good book and your own thoughts; a little solitude, a sanctuary.

At the moment, coming into the library early in the morning is as close as I’ll get to having my own private library. While the building is dark and empty, I get to commune alone with these my friends, the stories of the world, the minds and lives and imaginations of people stretching back for centuries. I can walk among the shelves, running my hands over the spines of books, looking for old friends to sit in front of an evening fire with, or new ones who I long to get to know. A book is like a room of one’s own, a place of refuge, learning, and self-discovery. They can take you to another place or time, submerge you in someone else’s experience and thoughts, or open you to new ideas and ways of being.

So, for a cold winter evening of finding refuge in a good book here are some suggestions. There’s always Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. It’s not an easy read, in my opinion, but thought provoking and interesting to see what’s changed since she wrote it and what hasn’t. Or try a classic. There’s been a rush on To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee lately and it’s no wonder. It’s one of those books I can read every once in a while and it still grips me. Or for a little light mystery try Three Bags Full by Leonie Swann. I love this mystery where a flock of sheep figure out who killed their shepherd and then have to find a way to make the humans understand them. I’m partial to sheep, of course, but it’s still a fun read.

All Creatures Great and Small by James Herriot is a favorite of mine, but be prepared to be caught laughing out loud at the antics of this Yorkshire veterinarian and his neighbors. For something newer there’s Mennonite in a Little Black Dress by Rhoda Janzen, the story of Janzen’s returning home to recuperate after a car accident. As an academic who left her family’s religion behind, Janzen finds herself once again immersed in Mennonite culture. Her account of going home, even if only temporarily, is hilarious.

For some good non-fiction, Wendell Berry’s classic The Unsettling of America is worth the effort. It’s not an easy or fast read, but Berry’s thoughts on American agriculture are as timely now as when they were first written in 1977. Maybe even more timely. Bluebird: Women and the New Psychology of Happiness by Ariel Gore is an interesting take on the new “happiness” industry. Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking has Undermined America by Barbara Ehrenreich is also worth a look. For something totally new, (and no, I haven’t read it yet) reading I Shall Not Hate: A Gaza Doctor’s Journey on the Road to Peace and Human Dignity by Izzeldin Abuelaish seems like a really good way to spend the winter.

So even if you can’t have your own private library or a room of your own, find a good chair, a warm spot and a good book. It will be almost like having “a room of your own.”

Five Great Christmas Gifts for Librarians

2010-12-14T10:36:00.000-08:00

1. Avoid feeding the librarian bleu cheese, or the book equivalent. There’s something about blue- green mold on food or books that makes us lose our appetites. It’s a funny thing about books getting wet, even when you blow them dry with a hair dryer, we still know they were wet once. Librarians may not be omniscient, but we know a few things. Dried books still mold, the glue dissolves, the pages fall out. So as a Christmas gift to all librarians please, don’t go surfing, water skiing, or bathe with your library books. We can’t keep a book that’s been water damaged. It has to be replaced. Even though we have a science club, we try not to have mold-growing experiments going on the shelves. So, please, if a book gets wet, tell us. Yes, we will ask you to pay for it, but isn’t that better than causing the librarians to curse and have mini-strokes when they find moldy books on the shelves?

2. Promise to not use your library books as trivets. Here’s another funny thing, mylar covers (the little plastic covers we put on books) melt. The big melted hole in the mylar cover is usually a dead give away that you’ve been setting hot pans on your library books. Replacing the covers isn’t impossible, but usually they are glued on, which means we may tear the book when we replace it. So please, buy yourself a trivet or pot holder for Christmas. We’ll consider it a personal gift to the librarians.

3. Don’t use library DVDs or CDs as dinner plates, Frisbees, or other disk shaped items. We don’t mind the occasional fingerprint or even small scratch. Usually we can clean those off, or resurface the disk. But DVDs that are returned with spaghetti sauce on them, or mud, or paint, really get us wondering. Although spaghetti sauce and mud will wash off (we just create some really great stories about how it got there), the paint doesn’t. That means the DVD has to be replaced. So feel free to put the CDs and DVDs in the player, but as a Christmas present to librarians everywhere, please don’t use them as Frisbees, dinner plates, or shovels.

4. Buy yourself a book mark for Christmas instead of turning down the corners of the page to mark your place. There’s no doubt about it. Librarians are a persnickety lot. We like everything perfect. We like a place for everything and everything in its place. We like books to last and stay looking clean and new. Every time the corner of a page gets turned down, it makes a crease and weakens the page. Eventually the corner will tear off and the book, although still readable is less than pristine. Even though it’s an easy way to mark your page and it doesn’t seem to be doing much harm, it drives librarians nuts! We have loads of bookmarks that we will give you for free. You can get a bookmark with our hours, or one with a story courtesy of the Homer Writers’ group. We have bookmarks about OverDrive, the downloadable audio system, and book marks with animals on them. We have bookmarks from the summer reading program and lost and found bookmarks that were left in books. So get a bookmark for Christmas and don’t turn down the corners of the pages!

5. Take a vow to never crack the spine of another book. Books just aren’t made like they used to be. The pages aren’t sewn in. There’s no reinforcement other than glue. If you’re the first one to read it, it’s not going to lay flat, so you can eat dinner and read with no hands. Forcing the spine open so that the book lays flat cracks the glue, makes the pages fall out, and means the book will need to be replaced soon. Lately we have books falling apart after only five or six readings. But if it’s a copy of The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, there are a lot more than six people who want to read it. So treat the book and its spine with respect. It needs to last a long, long time. We will all love you for it. And it will be one of the nicest gifts you can give all librarians, everywhere.

A Library Halloween

2010-10-13T11:18:00.000-07:00

She squeezed her coffee mug against her body, trying to keep her book bag on her shoulder as she twisted the key in the lock. The door had its own secret combination; push the key in while turning and simultaneously pulling the door toward you. It took two hands, but she didn’t want to set everything down on the wet step, so she balanced mug, lunch bag, and book bag against her body while turning the key. The coffee sloshed in the mug, as she struggled with the door, but miraculously kept from coming out and spilling down her nice yellow sweater. The door popped open. Taking her mug firmly in her hand, she walked through the door and kicked it closed behind her.

The library was totally empty and quiet. She smiled her shoulders relaxing. This was her favorite time of day, when she stood here all alone, just her and the books. They had the place all to themselves for these few hours before the library opened for business.

She walked into her office, set down the mug and book bag and clicked on her computer. The little fan inside the computer began to hum, like 1000 bees warming up for the day. She looked down at the payroll tax forms lying on her desk and sighed. Her least favorite job in the whole library, but there was no putting it off any longer. She sat down, now that the place was quiet and she had it all to herself, to get the job out of the way. She could think of a hundred jobs she’d rather be doing: purchasing books, processing books, planning programs, writing the newsletter, even shelving books, or straightening the continually messy and out of order shelves. Anything but the tax forms, the figures that needed to be done over and over, rechecked and recalculated till she had assured herself they were done right and ready to send in.

A clatter came from down in the basement. She turned her head toward the basement stairs and listened for a moment, cocking her head. When she first started working here, she’d go and investigate every bump and thump in the building. It was an eerie old building to be alone in. She’d open every closet, look in every storage area, checking to make sure she was totally alone. She’d gotten use to the old building with it’s creaks and thumps and now just stopped a minute to assure herself there was nothing unusually going on downstairs.

The elevator began to rumble and she could hear the mechanics of the machine gearing up down below the basement. It rumbled up from the downstairs, giving its characteristic ding, just before the elevator door opened outside her office. No one was inside, and the doors slowly closed again as the elevator rumbled back down. She’d been freaked out when she first started working in the building and had discovered how the elevator wandered the floors of the library of its own accord. Now it was just another quirk of the old building; regular and reassuring. She figured the machine had to get itself warmed up and moving in the morning, much like she did.

She turned back to the tax forms, but the sound of wheels rolling across the main reading room’s bare wood floor interrupted her. Now, that was decidedly not a normal sound. She pushed her chair back to investigate.

As she came into the room, she could see the handles of the book truck, over the top of the circulation desk. It was definitely rolling across the floor, but there was no one moving it.

She moved very slowly and quietly around the desk, hiding behind one of the pillars. She peeked around the corner at the rolling book cart. It seemed to be rolling by itself and then she saw him. He was about as big as the palm of her hand and he was giving the cart a push and then jumping on the leg to ride along until it ran out of momentum. His ears were long and flopped over like a dog’s. His face was a human’s in miniature. As he grinned, large pointy canines stuck out. He wore brown pants that were frayed around the bottoms, and a dirty shirt that seemed to be covered with dust.

She shook her head trying to clear her vision. The kobold caught sight of her and stared back. He grabbed a book off the cart and, carrying the book that was at least 5 times his size over his head, ran toward the New Books shelf. He started to slide the book between the others.

“Don’t do that,” she yelled racing toward the kobold. “It needs to be checked in first.” He might be a eird mythical creature, but this was her library and no one re-shelved books without checking them in!

The kobold laughed a high-pitched squeal and dropped the book, racing off toward another shelf. She picked up the book, and turned to see the tiny creature, grabbing books off the shelf and randomly placing them on the next shelf.

“No,” she said, racing after him, but he just laughed and darted away.

“Kobolds,” a chilly voice said from behind the desk, “the bane of every librarians’ existence; the source of all the missing, misshelved, and ‘re-shelved without being checked in’ books.”

She was the only person in the library. There shouldn’t be anyone standing behind her. So who was that talking? The kobold stared in the direction of the voice. He did not look happy. She wasn’t sure she wanted to come face to face with whoever could put that expression on the kobold’s face.

She turned slowly and gawked at the woman standing at the circulation desk. Her hair was in a bun, with a pencil sticking in the knot of hair. The pencil had a date stamper attached to the end, like libraries had used thirty years ago. The woman wore a high-necked white shirt, buttoned up the front, tucked neatly into a black skirt that reached midway down her calves. And she was decidedly translucent. The books on the shelf behind her were visible through her shirtwaist. A gray fog twirled and swirled within the woman’s silver outline. The ghost of librarians past looked down her nose at the kobold with obvious disdain.

“I’m amazed with all this technology,” the sweep of her hand took in the computers, DVDs, books on CD, “that you haven’t found a cure yet for Book Shelf Kobolds.”

The ghost turned at looked at the librarian. “I’m Miss Baldwin,” the ghost said, “what’s your name dear?”

Staring at the ghost, she caught a flash of color out of the corner of her eye. Something was rappelling down the bookshelf. The little figure landed on the floor near the kobold, who was still watching the ghost warily, books scattered on the floor around him. The new arrival was the same size as the kobold, dressed in brown pants, with a green tunic, and wide leather belt around his waist. He wore a red stocking cap on his head, and had pointed ears reminiscent of Orlando Bloom in “Lord of the Rings.”

“Ah, the library gnome,” the ghost murmured. “At least you haven’t lost him. I can’t imagine what your shelves would look like, if he wasn’t here.” She gave a little sniff as she ran her fingers along a row of books, checking their spine labels to see if they were in order. Her finger stopped as she pulled a book free and repositioned it on the shelf below.

The little gnome released himself from his rappelling gear and turned toward the kobold. He placed his fists on his hips and threw back his shoulders, striking a Superman pose, as he began to scold the kobold. He chattered like an angry chipmunk.

Grabbing the nearest book, the gnome checked the spine label and slipped it back onto the shelf. When he reached for the next one, the kobold jumped on him, pushing him away from the book. They rolled across the floor, wrestling with each other, landing on another book. The kobold jumped to his feet and grabbed the book by its cover, dragging it across the floor. The gnome reached for the book, grabbing hold of the back cover. They stood, the open book stretched between them, each tugging it in opposite directions.

“Stop,” she screamed rushing toward them. “Don’t tear the book!”

The kobold released the book, sending the red-capped gnome sliding across the floor. The gnome tossed the book aside and dove for the kobold again, the two tiny creatures tumbling across the floor.

She picked them each up by the scruff of the neck, holding them apart dangling between her thumb and forefinger. They continued to try to grab and kick each other as they dangled in the air, cursing each other with high-pitched screams that made no sense to her.

“Stop it,” she yelled. “No fighting.” Great she thought, staring at the two miscreants in her hands, who now hung dejectedly from her fingers, hanging their heads in what could only be little people embarrassment. I’m really losing it now. I’m breaking up fights between mythical creatures.

The ghost of Miss Baldwin hovered next to her. “They always were fighters those two, even in my day.” She looked around the library, new computers at the computer stations, the online catalog, books on CD lining the shelves, DVDs to check out covering a wall. “ Nothing’s really changed you know, ” the ghost smiled.

“It’s okay really dear, these things happen. It’s part of being a librarian.”

“These things don’t happen” she wanted to yell. “You don’t exist.”

But somehow at the moment, the ghost’s existence seemed more real than all the things she had to do on her to do list. It must be doing the taxes she thought. Or all the kids she had to tell to be quiet everyday. Or tracking down missing books. Or figuring how to squeeze one more program out of an already overloaded budget. Or maybe it was doing yet another craft involving glue and construction paper without gluing herself to everything in sight. She was losing her marbles; breaking up fights between a library gnome and a bookshelf kobold, taking advice from a long dead librarian. A vacation was definitely what she needed.

She turned back to look at the two tiny creatures in her hands, but they had disappeared. She glanced around the empty reading room, looking down each row of stacks, but no silvery ghost glimmered in any corner. She peaked under the circulation desk, but no floppy eared kobold, or pointy hatted gnome hid anywhere. She shook her head, as if clearing the happenings from her mind. Maybe she was hallucinating, but the quiet of the building settled around her. She headed back to her office, but as she walked past the children’s room she remembered story hour was today. She’d better get the craft together. She squared her shoulders and headed into the children’s room.

She wheeled the art cart to one of the small round tables and sat down on the child-sized chair. There was something about sitting in children’s furniture that always felt secure. She pulled a pair of small blunt nosed scissors, designed for children’s hands, some construction paper and glue out of the cart and began to cut out shapes. She was the least crafty person around. A craft needed to be something simple, something she could do without having to go home and take Valium afterwards.

She cut out round circles of paper and began feeling calmer. Construction paper and scissors always had that affect on her. Forget that her end product never really resembled anything. It was the act of creating it that mattered. It soothed her.

She caught movement out of the corner of her eye and without turning her head saw the gnome climb the art cart. He picked up a pair of scissors, bigger than he was, and holding them carefully over his head jumped onto the table. He began to cut out different shapes in an assortment of colors, a few snips of his scissors producing a wide range of forms.

She picked up the glue and began to make her sample. The glue came out in a big glob and ran off the construction paper, falling on the table. She placed the cut out on the center of the paper. Glue squirted out from under the edges getting on her fingers as she patted the circle into place. Covered with glue now, she wiped up the glob of glue from the table with one of her fingers and painted it on a piece of green paper. Her fingers stuck to the paper. She shook her hand, but the paper refused to come loose. Her husband was right. They should have never let her out of kindergarten. Cutting and pasting was beyond her.

The kobold chose that moment to reappear, jumping onto the table and grabbing the scissors from the gnome. The two of them began pulling on the scissors, screaming their high-pitched screams at each other.

“Stop it,” she yelled and even shocked herself with the loudness of her voice echoing through the empty library. The kobold and gnome stood staring at her.

“Now, now dear,” the ghost materialized next to her. “You mustn’t raise your voice in the library.”

She dropped her head into her hands and realized she’d glued her hands to her hair. Pulling her head slowly back, strands of hair stuck to her fingers. Little pieces of construction paper dangled from her bangs, swinging in front of her eyes. Tears began to roll down her face.

The ghost shimmered in front of her. The kobold stood perfectly still, for once neither hiding, running, jumping, or screaming. The gnome walked over to her hand and patted her fingers. Climbing up her arm, he walked across her shoulder and reached up to pat her cheek, his small hand only reaching the underside of her jaw.

The ghost of Miss Baldwin took the pencil out of the bun and in a perfect arch, brought the end that bore the date stamp down onto the pieces of paper scattered across the table. She methodically began stamping the date on the little bits of construction paper.

“I know honey,” she said. “It’s not easy. But you’re the Librarian.” The ghost studied her pencil for a moment and then slipped the cool yellow number two pencil behind the librarian’s ear. “Now put the glue away. Wash your hands. Straighten your cape and get back out there. You’re the Librarian and its Halloween.”

When you feel like a good cry

2010-09-13T13:24:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I think, reading a book about someone’s loss and grief is like poking my tongue in a cavity. I know it’s going to hurt, but I can’t stop myself from doing it. I think, reading about grief, is also reading about love. I want that vicarious experience of a love that makes loss so painful and poignant. And I also want the reassurance that loss can be survived. In her memoir, Let’s Take the Long Way Home, Gail Caldwell delivers all that and more. She tells the tale of her life changing friendship with fellow writer, Caroline Knapp. And then when Caroline dies of lung cancer at the age of 42, Caldwell takes us along on her journey through the barren land of grief.

Gail and Caroline were introduced by their dog trainer. Their friendship, based on a love of dogs, the writing life, and their shared history of alcoholism, was a once in a lifetime relationship that grounded and stretched them both. Grieving Caroline took Caldwell through territory for which she had no map. Caldwell writes, “The only education in grief that any of us ever gets is a crash course. Until Caroline died I had belonged to the other world, the place of innocence and linear expectations, were I thought grief was a simple, wrenching realm of sadness and longing that gradually receded. What that definition left out was the body blow that loss inflicts, as well as the temporary madness, and a range of less straight forward emotions shocking in their intensity.” (p. 150)

Let’s Take the Long Way Home is a moving story of two women’s friendship, but it’s more than that. Gail Caldwell’s story chronicles the struggle of two women to carve out their own lives. It tells of the power of the human-canine relationship and the way dogs draw people together. Most of all it tells of living through the desolate landscape of grief.

A few years ago, I read Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, another moving memoir about loss. The book begins with Didion and her husband’s return from the hospital where their adult daughter was unconscious in the intensive care unit. As they sat at their dining room table that evening, Didion’s husband had a heart attack. He didn’t live to make it to the hospital. Didion writes of her year following his death, her year of grieving for her husband, while trying to cope with her daughter’s life threatening illness. The title comes from Didion’s realization that grief took her to a world where she wasn’t always sure what was real and what wasn’t, where she couldn’t always remember whether her husband was truly gone or not. Her writing is so intense, so deep, that reading it felt like I was experiencing the same confusion and uncertainity that Didion herself lived through. Didion’s magical thinking of grief comes alive with her very words.

Yet, friends and lovers aren’t the only things we grieve. Phillip Simmons’ book Learning to Fall tells the story of Simmon’s diagnosis with ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease. Simmons, a healthy young man with small children, faced the loss of his ability to walk, to carry his children, and finally to breathe on his own. He confronted losing the dream of a future, of watching his children grow up. And finally he grieved the loss of his own life, watching his days grow short as his body failed him. It’s a grief of a different order, told powerfully by a man who struggled to find joy and meaning in his diminishing days and body. Through loss, he wrote, he learned “the art of living.”

As I read Didion’s book, often crying, Bruce asked me why I was reading it. It’s hard to explain, how something so sad, can also be uplifting. Even though these books aren’t easy reads, they all left me hopeful. Life can be hard and painful, but grief somehow says we are alive, we loved well and we can learn the “art of living” as Simmons calls it. For a sad, yet hopeful read, pick up one of these books. But keep a box of tissues handy.

Book Marks

2010-08-16T11:55:00.000-07:00

I keep threatening to write a blog about the top ten ways to annoy the librarian, but I'm trying to hide my true personality as much as possible. I'll let you in on one of them though - it's turning down the corners of the page to mark your place. To all of you who do that, I just have one question - don't you know that library books are sacred? And that the belong to everyone? (Okay, that's two questions.) So, please, get a book mark to mark your place. It makes the books last longer and it will keep me from having a stroke!

In an effort to help you break your page creasing habits, we've got help and it comes from one of the best kept secrets in Homer - The Homer Writers’ Group! This group of fun loving writers is always looking for ways to encourage ourselves to write. Writing is hard work and most of us really do want someone to read our stuff. That’s why the Homer Writers’ Group started “Book Mark Stories.” We’re writing short stories that will fit on a book mark. So far we have four to choose from. The Mark of the Book by Lynn Olcott, Book Marks by Shannon Maxson, and two different stories entitled It’s a Book, Mark, one by Jane Richardson and one by Priscilla Berggren-Thomas.

If you want your very own collectible book mark short story by a member of the Homer Writers’ Group, or you want to break your habit of creasing library book pages and contribute to the better health of the librarian, stop by the library and pick up a bookmark.

Rules of Reading

2010-07-23T07:22:00.000-07:00

They stand, hips jutting out, swords swung over shoulders, midriff shirts and hip hugger jeans exposing flat, muscular abdomens. One after the other, they dot the covers of books lined up on the shelf. Girls with swords; it’s the latest fad in the fantasy scene. Modern girls fighting the unseen world, with swords, guns or their own hands. Whether they are demon fighters, vampire slayers, or shapeshifting mechanics, they all have killer abs and rock hard biceps. Oh, to be eighteen, sexy and dangerous!

So, you see, even librarians judge books by their covers. If the cover gets you to pick up the book, what keeps you reading? I used to believe that if I started reading a book, I had to finish it. Like there was some book reading god out there judging me on my completion rate. Until sometime after I finished my first college degree I realized I wasn’t reading very much. I had started this book that I just couldn’t get through, but because I couldn’t finish it I thought I couldn’t read anything else. Who made all these rules? And, of course, I realized I had. Or at least I was imposing them on myself. So I made new rules. First rule, no book gets read if it hasn’t total captured my attention by chapter two. And second rule, always read more than one book at a time.

As I’ve gotten older, my attention span has gotten shorter. There’s less time left and books get less chance to grab me. I’ve gone from giving a book two chapters, to one chapter, to one page, to one paragraph. Sometimes, I even decide in one sentence. All writers know this. Make your first sentence perfect. It may be the only chance you get.

I’m also of “the read a few books at a time” school. I like non-fiction, but I’m not a fast non-fiction reader. I always need a novel to alternate with my non-fiction. I usually have a book on writing I’m working on, too. And I may be reading a children’s or young adult novel, along with a slightly more literary work. I confess, I read a lot of young adult novels. They are fast past page turners that keep me reading. They usually have good first lines.

“What on earth do you have in here?” I get the comment a lot when people try to pick up my book bag. Books, of course! I not only read several books at a time, I like to carry them all with me. You never know when you finally get a minute to read, what you are going to feel like reading. So carry a selection, that’s my theory. I’ve usually got a novel, a couple books on writing, two journals and my netbook with me. Boy scouts aren’t the only ones who believe in being prepared. Writers and readers need to be always prepared, too.

So even though I don’t have rock hard abs and a sword in hand, if a see any demons I can hit them with my book bag. It’s loaded and ready for action.

Fun Summer Reading

2010-07-07T11:59:00.000-07:00

The gardeners among us usually read more in the winter time. Once it’s time to start digging in the dirt, we don’t see as much of them at the library. Yet, for many of us, summer is the time of reading, kicking back on vacation at the beach or by the lake with a good book. There’s a long list of new best sellers that most everyone wants to read this summer, from the Girl who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest to Sizzlin’ Sixteen. If you’re stuck in the holds queue and desperate for something to read, don’t forget there are a lot of good books out there; the oldies but goodies of the book world.

If you love southern fiction, try Brighten the Corner Where You Are by Fred Chappell. The story of Joe Robert Kirkman’s day as a school teacher in North Carolina during World War II, Brighten the Corner was one of my first exposures to the “southern” story and it’s still one of my favorites. It’s the kind of book that makes you feel like you’re sitting on the front porch with an old friend telling stories and drinking ice tea. But make mine unsweetened please.

For a light run read, I love Lorna Landvik’s Angry Housewives Eating Bon Bons. Landvik is one of my personal favorites. She creates stories of women friends that make me want to go out and join the koffee klatch. Angry Housewives traces the friendship of 5 women over the course of twenty plus years, as they fall in love, marry, raise children, divorce, and discover things about themselves and each other. And all the while, their friendship grows and sustains them. Yet, don’t mistake it for a sweet story. This book is also a laugh out loud hoot.

For a literary pick, I love Wallace Stegner’s Crossing to Safety and Birds in Fall by Brad Kessler. Kessler’s language is down right poetic. It’s a story about a woman who researches migrating birds and tries to find meaning after the death of her husband. Stegner’s book traces the fifty year friendship of two couples who meet out of graduate school in the 1930’s. Both husbands are English professors and writers. Kessler and Stegner both use language and metaphor beautifully as they tell their stories, but it’s the characters, as always, who keep us turning the pages. Here’s warning though, both stories are tearjerkers. So don’t read them while operating equipment!

If the sweet and literary doesn’t send you, here’s my suggestions for thriller and dog lovers. Play Dead by David Rosenfelt is about lawyer Andy Carpenter, who saves a dog from death row and then realizes the dog was witness to a crime. Andy now has to keep himself and the dog alive while trying figure out who done what. Then there’s Dog Gone It by Spencer Quinn. The story is told by Chet, the dog of a private investigator. With his easily distracted doggy memory, a great nose and an inability to communicate in human language, Chet has to solve the mystery and then make Bernie understand what happens. Rosenfelt’s books may be a little more serious, but Chet has to be one of the greatest characters to ever come to life on the page.

For lovers of Doug Adams A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy try almost anything by Christopher Moore or Terry Pratchett. My favorite’s by Moore include Practical Demonkeeping, Coyote Blue, and for the truly daring Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff Christ’s Childhood Pal. Be warned though, Moore is an acquired taste with language, sex and a high degree of irreverence. So, don’t try this at home if you aren’t prepared. Pratchett writes fantasy that takes place on Discworld, a flat disc that sits on the backs of 5 elephants, who are standing on the back of giant turtle, who is floating through space. Sir Pratchett (he’s actually be knighted by the Queen!) is a first class satirist, who can rip on anything from Shakespeare to Rock and Roll, or vampires to sorcerers, the army to the postal service. I prefer any Terry Pratchett novel that includes Death, his trusty steed Binky and Death’s granddaughter Susan, or Granny Weatherwax. Try Soul Music, Mort, or Lords and Ladies.

Finally, for something that defies categorization, I love anything by Connie Willis. Considered a fantasy writer, Willis has been doing time travel novels before it ever became popular. One of her best though has nothing to do with time travel and everything to do with life. Passages is an incredible story about a researcher who studies near death experiences and she discovers more than she ever imagined.

Playing with Words

2010-06-24T11:12:00.000-07:00

There’s a small, but intrepid, group of writers who meet in the library community room twice a month. They’re people who love words, love playing with words, love trying to express ideas, stories, poems, thoughts, emotions with words. I think everyone who comes to the library loves words. Whether we write them or read them, we love the sound of them as they are spoken, the feel of them in our mouths, the idea of them in our heads. And we love the people who put them on paper for us to read, to paint pictures in our minds, to create characters in our hearts, to stretch us with their thoughts. It’s why I love the idea of bringing authors to the library. Whether you are a reader or a writer, or both, there’s something about meeting someone who believes in the power of words and works to put them together in stories, poems and information that is thrilling. For us wordy nerds it’s like meeting a rock star, a movie star or a great athlete. These are the people we want to be like. These are the people who amaze us.

Having had the opportunity to meet a couple of children’s authors in the last year, I have to say they were everything I imagined and then some. Their generosity of heart was the most amazing part. Their willingness to share their knowledge, stories, and encouragement with kids (of all ages) was inspiring. That’s why I’m so looking forward to Maggie Shayne’s coming – because now it’s the “big kids,” those of use who occasionally still act like kids, but haven’t been in a long time, that get to experience that generosity first hand.

I haven’t met Maggie officially yet, but from all our conversations and from what people that know her have told me, I can’t wait. Here’s a woman who does the hard work of writing and not only makes a living at it, but makes the New York Times best seller list. It gives me hope! I particularly like that she titled her workshop “Lying for a Living,” because it makes writing sound a little racy, daring and dangerous, rather than the scary and painful endeavor it sometimes feels like. And she’s willing to share her experience and words of comfort (or maybe even a kick in the pants) with those of us who are toiling away, or just testing the waters, or looking for the courage to put our thoughts, dreams, hopes and words down on paper.

Maggie writes paranormal romance, but she’s written it all - from romance, to westerns, to thrillers. If you like a sweet love story, or you like you love interest to have fangs and a bit of bite, there’s something for everyone in Maggie’s writing. If you love to write, want to write, want to love to write, or love to read and meet people who bring stories and characters to life, come to hear Maggie on the 10th of July. She’ll be giving an all day writing workshop at the library from 9 am until 3 pm. Happily Ever After Bookstore will be selling her books and there will be a signing at 10:30 am and again around 1:30 pm. The workshop is free, but call the library at 749-4616 to register.

This workshop is made possible with Funds from New York State Council on the Arts Decentralization Grant Program, a State Agency, and the Cultural Resources Council, a Regional Arts Council. Matching funds were provided by the Wilkins Foundation.

Home again, Home again

2010-05-27T14:49:00.000-07:00

Home again, Home again, jiggity, jig, jig, jig.

We arrived home on Tuesday evening. Coming out of Hancock Airport in Syracuse, I was struck by the scent of home. It smelled of early summer, green and growing things, new mown hay. I hadn’t really noticed what England smelled like, but standing on the sidewalk outside of the airport, I realized it hadn’t smelled like home. It was wonderful visiting England, but it’s good to be home.

This morning, standing in the quiet, closed library, I breathed in the scent of books and looked at the book lined shelves, filled with stories, adventures, other places, other people, knowledge, information and entertainment. I’ve spent that last few weeks traveling around another country, but these books also offer ways to reach other countries, people, places, times, cultures, adventures and stories. I haven’t read much in the last few weeks, other than road signs like “oncoming traffic in the middle of the road,” “layby closed,” “loo,” and even “don’t be silly,” so I think it’s time to dig into a good book and discover other worlds. But this time it will be through reading instead of traveling. See you soon at the library!

Last Day - Windsor Castle

2010-05-24T09:55:00.000-07:00

Well, we head home tomorrow. It's been a great trip. Kind of sad to leave, but also totally exhausted, so coming home sounds good. Today we went to Windsor Castle for our last hurray in England.

Here's the view of the castle from the outside. Windsor is the oldest and largest continually inhabited castle in the world.

Here's the inner wall, once you come through the outer wall.

We visited the state apartments which are used by the royal family for state functions, but you can't take any pictures inside. Here's the walk up through the gates toward the state apartments.

The castle also has it's own church. It's called a chapel, but it looks more like a cathedral.

Windsor Castle is like a little village of it's own, within the castle walls. Here's the staff housing area.

Well, we fly out tomorrow morning. See you all soon.

We are winding down

2010-05-23T12:36:00.001-07:00

Well, we are coming to the end of our trip. Friday we went to the British Museum and the National Gallery. The British Museum, with it's Egyptian, Greek and Roman treasures, was like traveling all around the world. Here is a tablet of hieroglyphics.

And a mummy's tomb.

We couldn't take pictures at the National Gallery, but we saw VanGogh's, Renoir's, Monet's, even a couple of Rembrandt's. Then we went down to Westminster Abbey and attended Evensong. We had hoped to hear the choir sing, but instead it was just a hand full of tourists doing the singing. Here's the Abbey.

Saturday, we went to see the home and chapel of John Wesley, the founder of Methodism. Here's the chapel from the outside.

And the inside.

Today is was Kew Gardens. Here's the Palm House.

There are statues of the animals from the Royal coats of arms outside the Palm House. Here's the griffin.

And finally a funky flower!

Tomorrow it's on to Windsor Castle and then we fly home on Tuesday.

London

2010-05-20T14:21:00.000-07:00

We arrived in London yesterday. Hurray, no more driving on English roads. Instead we took the train into the city and boarded one of the Big Bus Tours. Spent the day riding around London. Went to Hyde Park and to the Natural History Museum, as well as seeing Parliament, 10 Downing Street and Westminster Abbey.

Here's the Horse Guards.

And Big Ben.

Today we went to the Tower of London. Here's the armor of a knight on his horse.

Here's a couple of Yeoman Warders, the guards who live at the Tower and do tours.

Wimpole Hall

2010-05-18T12:18:00.000-07:00

Well, we went to Wimpole Hall today - a estate built in the 1600's. And we finally saw Peter Rabbit. Here's Farmer McGregor and Peter in the walled garden.

Along with a manor house and gardens, Wimpole has a farm park which contains many rare breeds of livestock. Here I am riding a rare Blue Sheep.

Here's a Long Horn calf.

And finally the three little black sheep.

Yorkshire, Puffins and English Breakfast

2010-05-17T12:35:00.000-07:00

Well, we've had an action packed few days, covering large parts of England and seeing many sights. Not the least of which was finally having a real English breakfast - eggs, sausage, bacon, beans and tomatoes. We even got a picture of it!

We visited a few places in Yorkshire, including the Ryedale Folk Museum which highlights Yorkshire life and farming in the 1800 and 1900's. They have a few old breeds of livestock, including the Lincolnshire Curly coated pig. Isn't she a beaut?

Then we took a boat cruise along the chalk cliffs of eastern Yorkshire, where over 200,000 seabirds nest each spring and fall. They include razorbills, guillemots, gannets and puffins. Here are the cliffs with a colony of gannets. Gannets have over a 6 foot wingspan. They were almost extinct in England and have made a great comeback in the last 20 years.

Finally, we saw a few of the more elusive puffins. You probably can't tell from this photo - it was hard to get up close and personal, but here's a puffin. If you look closely you can see it's telltale white cheeks.

Of Sheep and Roads

2010-05-14T09:20:00.000-07:00

We leave the Lake District tomorrow and head down through Yorkshire. So today, we just took a little trip to the nearby town of Sedbergh. We toured an old woolen mill, did some walking and of course took pictures of sheep.

Here's a lamb using Mom for a warm and comfy bed.

And of course, the ubiquitous border collie, waiting for a 4-wheeler trip out to the sheep field.

And here are the roads I've been complaining about. This is the bridge on the way into Sedbergh.

Here's Main Street. Do I really want to drive down that?

Yes, this road is for two way traffic. But wait there are cars parked, so where am I supposed to drive?

Beatrix Potter and Herdwick sheep

2010-05-13T00:15:00.001-07:00

Wednesday we went to Hill Top, Beatrix Potter's home. We took the ferry across Windermere Lake and then the bus up to Near Sawrey, the village where Hill Top sits. Here's the sign at the ferry, telling the cars not to drive in to the Lake.

Beatrix Potter, the author of "The Tale of Peter Rabbit," used the royalties from Peter Rabbit to buy Hill Top. If you've seen the movie "Miss Potter," you may know much of the story. She moved from London and lived at Hill Top writing and illustrating more books. Unfortunately, we didn't see Peter Rabbit! She also became active in preserving hillside farms in the Lake District, helping keep the countryside available for all to enjoy. Here's her home, Hill Top.

We also finally found the elusive Herdwick sheep. Beatrix Potter was a breeder of prize winning Herdwicks, so it only makes sense we found these beautiful black and white sheep on the hill farms surrounding her home. Here's a Herdwick!

And now for the animal of the day. It's horses!

Sizergh Castle

2010-05-12T12:06:00.001-07:00

Tuesday we went to Sizergh Castle. (Don't ask me how you pronounce it!) The original part of it, the tower, was built around 1320. It has thick stone walls and only had one room per floor. It's been added on to and rooms subdivided since. The same family has lived in this castle since 1320, too. Newer sections were decorated in the 1800's, but the original tower definitely had a medieval feel. Here's a picture from the gardens.

The castle had a lovely rock garden, with fringy Japanese maples, tumbling water and pools. Here's a picture.

It was the day for cows, too. A few dairy cows were grazing near the castle. They came over for a drink and photo opportunity. Bruce was taken by the blue roan. Here she is.

The Lake District

2010-05-11T08:02:00.001-07:00

Well, we are in the Lake District now, the land of lakes, peaks, hiking, Beatrix Potter, and sheep, sheep and more sheep. Yesterday, we visited Castlerigg Stone Circle, not as famous as Stonehenge, but over 4500 years old. And just as important to the people of the time, as a ceremonial site. As great as the stones were, the sheep grazing around it were the best part, I think. Although, you had to be careful where you walked! Here's a picture.

Then we did a bit of walking near Bassenthwaite Lake. Here's that.

We've seen sheep everywhere and could easily take pictures of nothing but sheep. Here's a typical farm house. Stones are everywhere, as well as sheep. Stonewalls, incredibly close to the road. Stone houses, barns, circles, etc. etc.

And of course, the sheep. Here's a few Cheviot lambs looking into our back garden at the cottage we are staying at.

And another Cheviot lamb.

We kept thinking these guys were Scottish Blackface, but they are Swaledales. Here's a lamb.

And a ram.

We are still looking for the elusive Herdwick. A breed found almost exclusively in the Lake District. Not like anything we have in the US, they are black with white faces. Seen a few at a distance, but no pictures yet. But stay tuned, hopefully we'll find one!

Chatsworth House

2010-05-10T10:57:00.001-07:00

Saturday, we went to Chatsworth House. For all you Pride and Prejudice fans, this was Mr. Darcy's Pemberley in the Kiera Knightley version. Alas, no Mr. Darcy, but some house.

Here's the 6th Duke's dining room. He was a bachelor - do you think he has enough elbow room?

There was room after room of pictures, sculptures, treasures of every kind. But this guy was my favorite.

Tudor England

2010-05-07T12:16:00.000-07:00

Drove north on the highway today. No billboards on the roadside, but there was this one we couldn't resist at the service area.

Then we visited Little Moreton Hall, a house built originally in 1504. It was added onto by each of the next four generations, leading to a rambling home with pretty interesting angles! A real English Tudor home. And the families religion changed with every monarch, to keep them on the good side of the current king!

Then because we couldn't soak in the Roman Baths, we decided on a hotel with a jacuzzi. So here's where we are staying tonight, Friday. Had to eat a lot of grill cheese last week to help pay for it!

Bath and Jane

2010-05-07T12:11:00.001-07:00

Bath, England, for me at least it's the land of Regency Romances and Jane Austen. But long before Jane, Bath was originally settled by the Romans. Before ladies of high British Society, took the "cure," the baths were a temple, bath and gathering place for the Roman legions who conquered England.

Of course, Bath is still the epitome of Regency society in England. The place were the upper crust came in the winter to party, gossip and drink the water. Here's the Crescent, condos for the wealthy of the 1600 to 1800's.

Stonehenge

2010-05-07T11:52:00.000-07:00

Wednesday we went to Stonehenge, a stone circle over 4000 years old. It was built using some stone that were brought over 100 miles, all the way from Wales.

It was used by the people of the time as a calendar. When the sun fell through certain openings, they could tell what month of the year it was. They were agricultural people, very connected to the sun and the time of year.

But, I really liked the sheep grazing around the stones!

King Arthur

2010-05-07T11:33:00.000-07:00

Spent Tuesday in Glastonbury, a town that combines history from pre-Christian times with the legends of King Arthur and the ruins of an Abbey destroyed during Henry the 8th's reign. Here's the Tor, a tower that marks the place a church used to stand. Legend says that this is where Avalon really lay, the magical island where King Arthur was taken at the end of his life. It's high on a very windy hill, which we almost got blown off.

The story is that King Arthur and Queen Guinevere are buried here on the grounds of what used to be one of the largest and finest Abbeys in England.

Here are the ruins of the Abbey, which was destroyed when Henry the 8th left the Catholic Church and started the Church of England.

Finally - here's a little cultural and language education. The British call a bathroom a "loo" - so here's Bruce checking out the doggie loo in one of the gardens. Just a mite smelly!

Hello Rockin' Readers - and everyone else @ the Library

2010-05-04T07:45:00.000-07:00

Well, guess where I am? In the land of castles and manor houses. England. Somerset, Devon and Wiltshire to be exact.
We visited the Exmoor National Park two days ago, where we saw a castle built originally to guard the coast from Saxons. Later it was turned into a manor house for a wealthy family. Here's the castle, gate and gatehouse.

Then it was onto Stourhead in Wiltshire. For those adults in the crowd, here's where Mr. Darcy proposed to Elizabeth in the pouring rain in the Keira Knightley version of Pride and Prejudice. (At least it's where it was filmed!)

Here's the house and gate, too. Nice place to live, huh?

I'm here - In England

2010-05-02T10:13:00.000-07:00

Arrived Friday and have been rapidly learning new things. Like how to flush British toilets and drive on the left side of the road. Visited Wells, UK famous for it's Cathedral that is decorated with loads of statues. The pigeons like them, too!
There's a Bishop's Palace there, too that's surrounded by a moat. Just like a castle.

Yesterday, we visited Montacute House, a 16th century Elizabethan Manor. How'd you like to call this home?

Where in England is Priscilla?

2010-04-23T12:36:00.000-07:00

Well, it looks like it’s really going to happen! I’m going to England to celebrate completing my MLS degree. So join me for “Where in England is Priscilla?” I’ve been planning this trip, re-planning, and cussing the volcano, Eyjafjallajokull, for almost derailing the whole thing, but planes are flying again and I plan on being on one Thursday.

I’d planned on re-reading Jane (Austen, that is), checking out Arthur (the King and his Round Table), and revisiting Beatrix (and her cute bunny, Peter.) But I’ve run out of time for reading up on everything, so now it’s down to trying to see it all first hand. And learn to drive on the left side of the road. Being I don’t know my left from my right anyway, I figure it will be easy ;-)

I’ll be posting pictures and adventures, literary and otherwise, along the way for the Rockin’ Readers – but hey, even if your not a Rockin’ Reader you can join the fun and find out “Where in England is Priscilla?”

I'll give you a head start. We land in Bristol on Friday am. So follow the journey from there.

Learning History through Science Fiction

2010-04-09T09:58:00.000-07:00

I can already hear your sighs and see your eye’s rolling. What will she come up with next? Learning history though Science Fiction, really! And no I’m not thinking of alternative history, or what our world would be like if Abraham Lincoln hadn’t been assassinated or Germany hadn’t lost World War II. Although, those are interesting questions that some science fiction/fantasy novels do contemplate. No, what I’m thinking about is Connie Willis’ latest time travel novel, Blackout.

I’m a big Connie Willis fan, so maybe I’m biased, but reading this novel actually got me excited about history. I’m not big into history, or even historical novels. It all seems so dry to me. Yet, several of Connie Willis’ novels are about a group of historians in Oxford, England, who study history by experiencing it first hand. They have the ability to time travel, through a “net”, which can place them in a different time and place. The rules are that historians can only observe. They can’t do anything that might change history.

So in The Doomsday Book, our fearless historians go to the Middle Ages and try not to die of the bubonic plague. In To Say Nothing of the Dog, the book that got me hooked on Connie Willis, they travel to Victorian England and spend time boating on the Thames. Willis’ latest, Blackout, sends a group of historians to World War II England, where the get stuck during the Blitz. The books narrative, the descriptions of London during the Blitz, and the way people endeavored to live normal lives in complete chaos were absolutely gripping. I came away from the novel thinking, I need to know more about this. I need to know about the lives of ordinary people, trying to live ordinary lives, in trying and extraordinary times. I haven’t done it yet, but maybe, I’ll just check out some real history.

Historical fiction, and in this case science fiction, make history come alive because they tell history from the point of view of people. Characters who leap off the page and make us care about them deeply. Good non-fiction does the same. Whenever someone marvels about a non-fiction book that reads like fiction, you know it’s by an author who knows the importance of story and telling a good one. How accurate Willis’ description is, I can’t really say. But my trust in Connie as an author makes me willing to bet she did her homework.

I often hear adults bemoan that all their children or grandchildren want to read is fantasy or science fiction. “I want them to read something better,” I hear. Well, I could argue that there really isn’t anything better, but what I usually argue is that “reading begets reading.” If something grabs them, let them read it. Who knows what it will make them read next. After all, Connie might just might get me to read some history, because the lives of the British during World War II has come alive for me in her writing.

My only real complaint is that part two doesn’t come out till fall. So, I won’t find out what happens to my fearless Oxford historians, Polly, Mike and Merope, until October. I guess I’ll just have to find something else to read in the meantime.

Lifelong Learning at the Library

2010-03-16T07:38:00.001-07:00

The library has always felt like home to me. From the book filled shelves, to the warm honey colored wood, it’s a good place to be, a place to belong. Library Science School was much like that. I found myself in the company of people on their second and third careers, people from all walks of life, people with interests ranging from music to sports, science to Shakespeare, people who were always pursuing another degree, interested in learning about a new subject. It felt like I’d finally found my own people, people who were curious and loved to learn, the people who can’t quite decide what to be when they grow up, because everything is interesting, exciting, worth exploring.

It’s not just librarians though, who are lifelong learners. The library offers the opportunity for everyone to continue to learn, explore, seek new adventures, and all through books on the shelves at the library. When I first starting working here, I’d find something I wanted to read everyday as I checked in books. I was in school at the time (yes, imagine that) and pleasure reading was at a minimum. So, I’d write titles down on scraps of paper and stuff them in my pockets. At home every night, I’d pull all those folded, crumbled bits of paper out of my pockets. There was no rhyme of reason to what was written on those papers and no method in keeping track of them. I just didn’t want to forget one title, one interesting book that crossed over the desk.

Nancy, the librarian at the time, told me I’d regret it.

“The list will grow and grow,” she said, “until you realize you’ll never get all those books read.”

She was right, of course, but still it’s impossible not to keep trying to keep track of all the books that look interesting. It may seemed clichéd but the tee shirt is right, “So many books, so little time.” Right now I can go out to the “New Books” shelves and find a bunch of titles that sound intriguing. There’s “Eating Pomegranates” by Sara Gabriel, a memoir about the women in the author’s family and their struggle with the breast cancer gene. Or, Jaron Lanier’s “You are not a Gadget,” a computer scientist’s thoughts about the internet and how it may not actually be the best thing for society or people. Social based site like Wikipedia, Lanier contends, may have more credence than they deserve and maybe replacing the knowledge of experts and the wisdom of individuals with popular beliefs, opinions and urban legends. That’s something librarians have been saying for awhile, which brings me to a book I really want to read, “This Book is Overdue: How Librarians and Cybrarians can Save us All,” by Marilyn Johnson. But maybe I just want to read that because I’ve always dreamed of being a librarian by day and a superhero by night.

The library is a lot of things to a lot of people, especially a place to learn, grow and have fun throughout the lifespan. So come in and start your list of books to read during your lifetime!

How fiction changes the world

2010-01-28T09:41:00.000-08:00

The library’s book discussion group read “Reading Lolita in Tehran” this month. Personally, the book was a tough read. At times as I read about the oppression and fear these women were faced with on a daily basis, I felt like I was wading through a morass from which I’d never be free. Their resilience and spirit were amazing. I could write pages about what this book says to me as a woman, but what this book says to me as a reader is what I want to focus on here.

Azar Nafisi was and is a literature professor. Her discussions about literature from Jane Austin, to James Joyce, to Nabokov were often beyond me. Yet, as the book progressed what I kept wondering was why it was that novels and literature where so reviled by the Iranian regime, why it was literature professors that were questioned, intimidated and seen as revolutionary? Maybe scientists found themselves in similar situations and I just haven’t read about that. But I don’t think that’s the case. At least, that’s not the case Nafisi is trying to make. At its heart “Reading Lolita” is about the revolutionary, subversive world that fiction and novels open for us. Science, history, archeology all make us think, but it’s the ambiguity, the questioning, the opening ourselves to new and different ways of thinking and being that novels offer.

Religions, governments, parents even, have all come out against certain novels at one time or another. Reading fiction in general has been eschewed from time to time by different groups for reasons ranging from it’s "not real," it’s "not important," or it’s “just entertainment.” Nafisi’s book raises the question of whether what novels really do is open us up to questioning and thinking in ways that may threaten the status quo, the powers that be, or our own understandings and beliefs. From her perspective fiction, like many arts has the power to change the world. That makes it scary, and even subversive to some. So what have you read lately that rocked your world?

Books in Winter

2010-01-08T12:27:00.000-08:00

In the fantasy novel College of Magics, one of the wardens of the earth tells the young protagonist that she has done magic. “When?” she asks. “A year ago you made it snow in the cloister garden,” he tells her. “Perception and will. You perceived that is should snow. Behold. Snow.”

I can’t walk through the snow anymore without thinking of that line. Walking through the snow, my boots shush, pushing the snow aside. The temperature hovers around freezing, the air is heavy with moisture. It’s weather made for snowing. I can feel it in the air. It should snow and so it does.

Medium flakes, fluffy and heavy with water fall to the ground. They pile up. I feel their cool caress on my cheeks. Their melting wetness dots my glasses. They catch in my hair like dust in a cobweb. The valley is gray with falling snow, as if I’m looking through a veil. The cars going down the road across the valley sound as if they are far off, muffled by the whiteness that blankets my shoulders, covers my hat. The flakes fall down, caressing me, drifting to earth, just as they should. I can feel it, that sense that something is happening that is supposed to happen, something is unfolding just as it should.

The snow piles up along the bare branches forming little ridges waiting for that last flake which sends the whole mound avalanching to the ground. Flakes sizzle as they hit the power line. The air is electric, as if you can hear each flake landing. The trees on the hilltops are lined with snow, pines forming white pinnacles against the sky. The bare maples and ash trees stand, their dark skeletal frames outlined in white. The valley is like an ink drawing, dark trees against pure white snowy background, shades of gray filling the spaces in between. And everything is as is should be. Will and perception.

In all the moments of a day or a life, there may not be many that feel that way, but when the flakes begin to pile up on the ground, I scoop them up in my gloves as I walk along. They mold themselves into a ball, with almost no effort on my part. They seek each other out, longing to cling together, just like they longed to fall from the sky. They feel it just like I do this sense of rightness, this sense that yes this is meant to happen.

You can get that sense of rightness from a good book, too. The story that unfolds in a way that just feels right. You can also get the sense of snow and cold from a good book, which sometimes may be better than being out in it. Among some good snowy tales are the Scandinavian mysteries, which are growing in popularity. If you liked Stieg Larsson’s “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” try “Box 21” by Anders Roslund, “Snowstorm” by Åsa Larsson, “Frozen Tracks” by Åke Edwardson, or “The Water’s Edge” by Karen Fossum. There’s also some snowy non-fiction to choose from, too. “The Windows of Brimnes” is Bill Holm’s experience living in Iceland and Canadian Farley Mowat always provides good reading in books such as “Snow Walkers” or “High Latitudes.” So, enjoy the rightness of snowfall and a good read @ the library!

Why I love fantasy

2009-12-23T05:43:00.000-08:00

I often get the question “What have you read lately that’s good?” It’s a hard question to answer, because what I think it good other’s might not. As you can probably guess by the title of this blog, I read a lot of fantasy, science fiction, children’s books and young adult books. I’m always amazed at the look on people’s faces when they find out that the last book I read and loved was a Young Adult fantasy novel called “Going Bovine,” by Libba Bray. I won’t say they sneer, but some people only manage to stop themselves just before their face freezes into a grimace.
I’m also very fond of saying that some of the most spiritual writing I’ve ever read was fantasy and science fiction. I’m not sure why people are surprised at that, because, I think, exploring the world of the spirit is a lot easier in a fantastical imaginary world. Trying to put the world beyond the mundane into a novel about the mundane world, is always going to be a little tougher. And that’s why I loved “Going Bovine.”
“Going Bovine” is about a slacker teen named Cameron, who doesn’t get along with his parents, gets high in the bathroom at school and fails most of his classes. So far, probably not the upstanding young person a lot of parents want their kids hanging out with, or reading about. Cameron starts hallucinating, which surprises no one considering he uses drugs. Until it’s discovered he has mad cow disease, hence the “going bovine” of the title. That’s where the novel takes on the spirituality that fantasy explores so well.
Cameron goes on a road trip to try to save his life. Or maybe it’s just one major big last hallucination. But in the course of traveling the country looking for a cure with a dwarf and a lawn gnome, Cameron ponders the meaning of life, religion, the spirit, friendship, family and a few other major philosophical musings. A lot of times when literary authors muse on the meaning of life it can come across as just wanting to hear themselves talk, or pushing their own theories. Of course, that’s probably what a lot of writings about anyway. But in fantasy, we can explore incredible subjects in a fantastical world without every taking ourselves too seriously. And maybe that’s a major part of what spirituality and literature are all about, explorating everything beyond our understanding with as light a touch as possible.
When I first started working at this library, Nancy Harbison, the director at the time, always encouraged me to read picture books when they were returned. I developed the “a picture book a day, keeps the psychiatrist away” philosophy. So, I’d encourage everyone to read picture books, but don’t stop there. You be amazed at all the great literature written for children and teens that you might be missing out on, because you think of it as “kid’s books.” Start with “Going Bovine.” You may just be surprised. If it doesn’t answer the meaning of life for you, it will brighten your day.

Welcome to the Phillips Free Library Blog

2009-12-21T10:13:00.000-08:00

Along with updates of what's new at the library, including books and programs, this is the place to find the latest musings and ponderings of the librarian. More to come. Stay tuned.