Wild berries

When someone asks me how I became a librarian, I say that I was recruited. In part, this is a diversionary tactic. People seem to either have strong positive or negative reactions to librarians. By stalling, I can wait for the person to begin to share how he or she “always wanted to be a librarian.” This is usually followed by how nice it must be to sit and read all day in a quiet place. Conversely, the person sometimes explains that libraries are old fashioned now that the Internet is available. Printed books are yesterday’s technology, they tell me. Since I never worked in a quiet library or read all day on the job and I believe that many people still do need libraries, both of these responses make me wince.

 

But, I was recruited to be a librarian. My four years of under graduate study had been to achieve another goal. During spring break of my senior year, I went to the City Library with a ten-year-old child.

 

Wanda, the Children’s Librarian, asked me what my plans were after graduation. I explained that I had applied for teaching jobs. “You should be a librarian,” she said firmly to me. I was doubtful. Still, she insisted that I go directly up to the administration office and complete a job application while she checked out the books. I didn’t give it much thought at the time.

 

Following graduation, I moved back to my parents’ home. Only a few days later I received a telephone call from the Assistant Director in charge of personnel at the library. There was an opening for a Children’s Librarian at one of the branches. Did I want it? Even if I had doubts, I quickly responded in the affirmative. Teachers were plentiful at that time and I had been warned that jobs were hard to get.

 

On my first day at the Branch Library I felt like Alice falling down the rabbit hole. Summer Reading Club was beginning. When I reached the granite steps, several children were already waiting for me to unlock the doors and let them inside. Among the children on the stairs was a toddler still holding a bottle to her lips. She would occasionally remove the bottle to curse obscenities. The other children ignored her epithets. When I reached the top step, she stopped long enough to look up and smile. “Hey, the Lie-berry Lady!” she announced to everyone. My key unlocked the door and the older children moved to form a queue in front of my new desk.

 

Soon I discovered that my job was to listen to the seemingly endless row of children who stood patiently in line. Each child was to report on the books he or she had read while I recorded them in the tally sheet. Some of the children were gregarious, some were shy, some had families that spoke English, and others had families that spoke only Portuguese or Spanish.

 

The school-aged children were members of the Summer Reading Club and they would go back to school classrooms in September with much improved reading skills.

 

The youngest children were two to four years old. They could not yet read. They came because their older siblings were caring for them while their parents were at work all day. They would go outdoors to the front steps at noontime to munch on their peanut butter and grape jelly sandwiches.

 

They came to ask what to feed the stray kittens that lived behind their housing complex. They came to ask whether lightning bolts shoot down from the sky or up from under the ground. They came to trade postage stamps that arrived from relatives in other parts of the world. They came to talk about books and stories with the “lie-berry lady.”