As of December 2015, I have a part-time job at the Wheaton Public Library.
To be more specific: I work at the circulation desk of the Wheaton Public Library.
This is the library of my girlhood. I spent hours here after school and on Saturday afternoons, roaming the stacks in the then-smallish, now-largish children’s area. When I found a book I liked, I’d sit right down on the floor wherever I happened to be, and read until it was time to go home. Like many, I had a horse phase, and it was at this library that I first discovered the author Marguerite Henry. As a third grader, I saw her read at this library and then—in awe: writers are flesh and blood people too!—I stood in a long line so that she could sign my copy of Misty of Chincoteague, and SHE SMILED AT ME! Here, I cracked open encyclopedias in order to write grade school papers; I completed high school projects, as well. Irritated and somewhat mortified, I spat out the gum I wasn’t supposed to have, ceased my whispering with friends, and tried to suppress convulsive laughter.
Those were the days.
These are also the days.
Now when I take my fifteen or twenty minute breaks in the first floor sorting room, I sit at a desk beside this card catalogue, which I probably used when those were the days. I feel a great affection for it—an affection that borders on reverence. What a beautiful object, this keeper of knowledge and order. Others are typically in the room with me, doing their jobs. But were they not, I might just bow down before the card catalogue. Listen (if you’re of a certain age). Can’t you hear the wooden drawers slide open and closed?
The Wheaton Public Library went through a major renovation in 2007, soon after my family and I moved back to this town to stay. There are a few things that were retained from the 1965 structure of my child and younger adulthood—a stairway, for example, and a certain wall–but for me continuity exists mostly in this or that particular cast of light at this or that particular time of day/season/weather. I know this February afternoon, I’ll think. I’ve been here before. Now if I could just remember when. Was it in the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s, ’90s, or was it more more recently that?
More recently than that, after the renovation was completed, I have done much of my writing—fiction and freelance and the occasional post for this blog, as well as class preparation and grading for the writing classes I sometimes teach—in the library’s Quiet Reading Room. It is a beautiful place with a view of my favorite park in Wheaton, Adam’s Park—the perfect place to Get Things Done Without Much Interruption. In fact (Spoiler Alert), before I applied for the part-time job I now hold, I used part of the acknowledgements page of my soon-to-be-released novel, Broken Ground, to thank the Wheaton Public Library for its Quiet Reading Room. I believe I called it “the go-to workplace of my adulthood.” Little did I know.
I applied for the job at the circulation desk for various reasons, which include:
- Money. Every little bit helps.
- Proximity. When the weather gets warmer I can ride my bicycle, bicycle!
- Pleasure. So many books, cds, dvds, so little time. Let me get my hands on you.
- Human contact. I let myself get isolated in these last years. It can be the writer’s curse. Also the curse of simultaneous consecutive deadlines, particularly when you’re also invested in your husband and kids, and lets not forget the dog and tortoises. Also a suburban curse, I think. Also the curse of someone who tips back and forth between introvert and extrovert, and has a hard time balancing the tension between the two. I had gotten Godawful lonely. Time to get out into the world, I decided. And I did. I have. So many people—different as can be—pass through the library every day. And then there are the people with whom I work, a new little community, willing to accept me, and each and every one of them is kind.
It’s funny. Two people–a married couple, speaking companionably almost as one, the husband of which I have known since I was a little girl, as he taught in the Conservatory at Wheaton College with my parents—recently said to me: “This is a wonderful thing, you’re doing, Karen. This service to the community.”
I was grateful for their affirmation, but I didn’t quite know what to say in response. Why? I finally figured it out today, listening to an audiobook that passed through my hands at the Circulation Desk of the Wheaton Public Library, and which I checked in, and then, after less than the blink of an eye, checked out again to myself: BIG MAGIC, by Elizabeth Gilbert. She said something lovely and friendly and wise about creativity, and I made the connection to my new form of part-time employment.
It’s not that I’m serving the community in doing this job. It’s that this job and the community are doing a great service for me.