Let me speed up the point of this essay, which will save you time in your harried and purposeful days. This is a bouquet to the Belmont librarians.
It’s a funny kind of relationship between a reader and a librarian. I know nothing about my librarian, while she knows intimate parts of me (if she cares): the usual demographics—name, address—but also a rendering of life history through check-outs. She can guess when a baby’s coming from the pregnancy advice books (none recently). She can tell whether there’s been a death from books on reserve about coping with grief. She knows that I’m trying to cook ethnic food or who is considering a formidable wedding cake. There’s a close grip on whether I—or any other readers— prefer fiction to reality, historical analysis to graphic novels.
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She knows all this about me each time I come in.
I know which pair of earrings she is wearing.
That elderly and cantankerous librarian with half-glasses, the one who spoke in severe whispers and stamped library due dates with frightening firmness, has retired. Some of us have it on authority that she never existed. In this town of ours, every librarian seems vibrant, friendly, collegial, and open for conversational business. They’re also in constant public view and, with the demolition of the main branch, sit literally with their backs against the wall in a corner of the Senior Center. It’s a displacement, and yet not an ounce of their graciousness has disappeared. Equanimity must be offered as a course in the library and Information Science graduate school.
Since their relocation from the roomy former entrance hall on Concord Avenue to a generously offered but more cramped corner of the Senior Center, I have not heard a whine or sigh from behind the circulation desk. One particularly cheerful librarian told me that she finds the quarters cozy. Those in this country who practice that attitude—uncomplaining, pragmatic, forward-looking—should be running it. They are making terrific lemonade.
Still, at bottom, there is an imbalance. Ours is a unilateral agreement, not unlike therapist and patient. The therapist is free to figure out identifying truths about her patient, and the librarian is, too (in some luxurious spare time she has none of). No reciprocal knowledge is available to the patient or the reader. What we know instead is their pleasant greeting, their patience while retrieving books from narrow aisles, and their graciousness when answering the same questions over and over. They ask for nothing, including overdue fines.
Busy us, we pull out our cards, grab our books and head off to Shaw’s or Butternut Bakeshop. Maybe—and I speak to myself here, using the royal pronoun–we ought to take better note. I run to the library frequently; it will happen many times before their move back to that rising castle on Concord Avenue. After I’ve taken my books and my card back, maybe I’ll ask the librarian what book she’s reading. It’s not the four-course dinner she deserves, though it’s a start.
Elissa Ely writes about seniors/baby boomers for The Belmont Voice. She is a community psychiatrist.
