When in Danger or in Doubt
Go to the library
For many years, I worked in public libraries, and among my duties I gave a report to the library board every year about my job and what I did. In 2018, in lieu of enumerating my duties in a resume-like fashion, I wrote the following and read it to them. I was reminded of it today and wanted to share it. Mourn, then organize—and maybe go for a walk to the library—and thank everyone who works there.
“The years I spent getting high and reading library books I do not regret” is a line from The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner, a novel about a woman in California serving two consecutive life sentences and her reflections on her life both before and after she went to prison.
I posted this line on Facebook the other day and people got concerned that I was endorsing drug use, which I’m not. But I am saying that so much of the influence the library has on people we’ll never know. Part of my job is to help make it possible for us to have that influence, by doing mundane things such as keeping the desks staffed and ordering books to fill the shelves and weeding books to make room for the new ones.
Here, for instance, is the summer desk schedule. At any time, we need five people staffing the desks at the library, and because it’s summer, we often need extra coverage on some of the public service desks. In addition to our thirteen permanent, mostly full time staff, we have eighteen part time staff working here this summer (and we may be hiring another person). Those eighteen or nineteen people often have other jobs or classes or childcare obligations, and some days they get sick or take well-deserved vacations, so I spend a lot of time figuring out how we’ll cover the desks for both short and long term contingencies. This morning one of our part time staff texted E and me to say his daughter was sick and he could work his morning shift but would need the afternoon off so his wife could go to work, so I spent some time coming up with various solutions to that.
Of course, sometimes we do get to know something about the effect we have on our patrons’ lives. In addition to the work I do inside the library, I do some outreach. Today I went out with the Antelope Lending Library bookmobile for a stop at Western Hills. We’ll be there every Wednesday this summer. I told a woman who can’t drive anymore that we could deliver books to her on the bookmobile, and I signed up three kids for the summer reading program. “You get a tshirt at the end,” I said, trying to sound enthusiastic about something I can’t imagine being that exciting. “Oh!” said one girl. “My friend got one of those once!” They were thrilled at the prospect.
Every other week I also go out to the IMCC. We provide library books for the inmates there who’ve achieved the highest privilege level at the prison. I always wish we could serve all the patrons there, and I always wish I could carry more books. As with the regular library, most people there come, get their books, and go on their way. But one day there a patron said to me, “I heard that George Orwell wrote some other books besides Animal Farm and 1984.”
“He sure did!” I said, “and I can bring you some.” It turned out we didn’t have any editions of his essays, so I had K order one, and I took it out to him. I gave him a list of the ones you absolutely have to read—“Such, Such Were the Joys” and “Shooting an Elephant” and “Politics and the English Language”—and the next time I was out there he asked if he could keep the book for longer because he wanted to read some more.
Of course, sometimes the patrons we get to know aren’t so delightful. I spend a certain amount of time listening to a woman who calls the library frequently very worried about something she’s searched for and whether it will lead her to child pornography and whether that will get her in trouble. “Can you just look that up for me and see what it says?” she’ll say. As you can imagine, these aren’t fun conversations to have on the public service desk. “No, searching for kiddie po doesn’t bring up anything bad. I don’t really want to Google kiddie xxx for you.” I started having staff transfer all her calls to me to spare them from having to try to handle her questions gracefully and discreetly while working at a public desk. Now she calls the library and asks for me. Today she called three times, and the third time I asked her how recently she’d seen her doctor or her therapist (a few years ago she called and asked if I’d talk to her doctor on the phone—she was at her office). “I just got out of the hospital,” she said. I asked if that had helped, and she said a bit, and I asked about whether they’d scheduled a follow-up appointment and encouraged her to tell the doctor there all the things she’d told me today.
I started by quoting a new book and I’m going to end by quoting a much older one. Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son is a classic book about heroin addiction (or about the effects of urban renewal on Iowa City), but it ends with the narrator sober and working at a residential home for people with disabilities. He says, “All these weirdos, and me getting a little better every day right in the midst of them. I had never known, never even imagined for a heartbeat, that there might be a place for people like us.”
If the public library is anything, I hope it is a home for those people—and my job, as I see it, is to do what I can to keep the place running.
I don’t work in a public library anymore, which, according to my kid, means I’m not a librarian anymore, and although I do work for libraries, I often agree with him. But my heart today—and every day—is with the people checking your books out and back in, helping people figure out online job applications while helping someone else scan a photo and upload it to Facebook for their family and explaining, for the twentieth time in twenty minutes, how the print release system works.
Your local public library is just that: local. Only a sliver of its funding and its control come from the state and federal government, and while the outcome of this election will empower the people trying to take over local library boards, it can’t give them away without a fight. That’s a fight you can be a part of. Please do.