Field notes from the Rural Librarian

Note from my mother, the small town library director:

“Well I just had my picture taken with a green bean and a carrot. They are running around promoting the farmer’s market that the community center is having. Another thing they didn’t tell you about in library school. I have a horrible feeling that’s it’s going to be on the front page of the paper.”

Shoes

So now that I live in New York, my habit of wearing all black in the summer has a certain cachet. In other states, however, there are apparently things called “summer clothes” which are pastel in hue and employ an efficient use of fabric. I discovered this while at a party in Austin, where my black mules became an object of some amusement. “It must still be cold in Michigan,” a helpful Texan proclaimed, “since you still have your winter shoes on.”

Up until that point, I had only been familiar with three categories of shoes: Cute, Hiking, and Work.

Now, apparently, there was some mysterious fourth category, a shoe only used for two months out of the year. A summer shoe. A quick survey revealed that every woman at the party besides me was wearing rubber thongs on her feet. Yes, those things that people wear in the shower when visiting locker rooms or suspicious motels. Fortunately, I work in a library where extreme office temperatures and the wearing of cardigans is expected, and the issue of summer shoes has not reared its head.

That, by the way, was my summer shoe story which I promise never to tell again because I have officially worn it out. Some stories are so easy to pull out in certain situations that they get overused, tired and worn. Others never wear out, and their telling becomes a sort of ceremonial chant. The shoe story ends here.

In other news, my department is running a workshop this week, and as a result I spent a small part of my day sorting tea into different colors and arranging it in rows.

It was a weirdly library-like thing to do, all of this sorting and arranging, and although I know that tea is often presented this way, I still felt the urge to affix little catalog numbers to each row of tea.

If this is a symptom of someone who needs a vacation you may rest easy. I’ll be in Pennsylvania all next week.

Morning Ralph

You know that old Warner Brothers cartoon with the coyote and the sheepdog? The sheep dog and the coyote both come into work and punch the time clock, and one goes “Morning Ralph” and the other goes “Morning Sam.”

Remember? That one?

Ok, so I’m leaving work last night, and I see somebody from the reference department coming in for her shift just as I’m leaving. And of course I say “Morning Ralph,” because of course everyone in the universe has the same cultural touchstones as me right?

And of course she has no idea what I am talking about, and of course I’m a big freak.

True Romance!

I popped in to the Tompkins County Public Library yesterday to take advantage of the few hours that they are open after recent budget cuts. I believe I represent many library workers in my inability to return library materials on time. My friend Mark worked at circulation when I was in college, and I got kind of spoiled as a result.

Anyway, I paid my $13 fine, and received a wonderful reference interview from one of the librarians. And I found this: Truer Than True Romance: Classic Love Comics Retold! a parody of all of those hideous True Romance comics of the 40’s and 50’s. The comic art archive where I used to work collected many of the originals, and shelving them was always a swoopy-swoony blast. Afterward, I took to biting my knuckle in times of stress.

True Living Room Confessions

There are mushrooms growing in the corner of my living room. I discovered them when I moved the wireless router upstairs and removed a tangle of cords. There they were. Three little mushrooms. Growing. In the carpet.

I live in one of those beige apartments where everything is new and clean and entirely characterless, so mushrooms in the carpet, even beige mushrooms, seem out of place. I will be moving in a few weeks, so we took this discovery in stride. I decided to leave them as conversation pieces. “Welcome to my home, have you met the mushrooms?”

On a cinematic note, the mushrooms bear an uncanny resemblance to the ear in the opening scene of Blue Velvet. Of course this has nothing to do with libraries, but if it makes you feel better I will call the reference desk and ask for a book on common living room fungi.

That Reference Compulsion

So my friend Clay (of reference desk fame) and I have just gotten out of our dance class, and we are talking about books. A woman overhears us and starts talking about a book she is reading on the subject of Jack the Ripper.

“What was that book?” she asks, “The one they made a movie out of?”

At this point I should pause and remind you that neither of us were in any way identifiable as librarians, nor were we at work, where we might have had a contractual obligation to answer this woman’s question. Yet answer it we did, with alacrity.

We pipe up, “Oh! you must mean the graphic novel From Hell by Alan Moore,” and our cover is blown. We have been exposed as professional know-it-alls. Any chance we might have had to pose as members of another, sexier profession has been lost.

We couldn’t just say “huh” like normal people. Nope, had to jump in there with the full bibliographic citation.

Library Tourism, Ithaca

The weekend was so good that it took me until Tuesday to write about it. With a full serving of book-shopping, horse-petting and firework-ogling,  I luxuriated my way around Ithaca, reveling in the not-work.

I discovered that libraries can be found in the most surprising places. The bird sanctuary where the beavers live also houses a new audio and video library, complete with some very hip compact shelving and an enormous AV-lab. I saw a huge turtle from the window outside their reading room, so I am now a big fan.