The World’s Strongest Librarian

  The first meeting I attended was in the art room of a local high school. The chairperson, an elderly, energetic woman, stood and read the agenda. She spoke so enthusiastically that the enormous cross dangling from the chain around her neck disrupted her balance as she emoted. “Now, if we can please have the crime bulletin.”

  A policeman in uniform stood and introduced himself. He handed out a sheaf of papers that we passed amongst ourselves. Each district in the city was broken down on a spreadsheet by various crimes committed the previous month.

  “Something I know that you’ve all been concerned about,” the officer said, “is that we’ve finally stopped the old woman who’s been selling corn out of her cart.”

  A cheer from the crowd. His other reports were less interesting but more practical: Carjackings were down, but keep locking your vehicles. Graffiti was up, so call the hotline. And once again, if you saw the old lady selling corn, let him know and he’d assemble a team to vanquish her.

  “Okay then,” said the chair. “Is there any business from the previous meeting to revisit?” An elderly gentleman in green pants raised his hand, stood, and offered a ten-minute disquisition on event-controlled versus time-controlled traffic lights, and could we please get event-controlled lights because the traffic on North Temple during the morning commute was horrendous, just horrendous.

  More people drifted into the room. Most had a story to tell. It was like they’d wandered into an amateur storytelling festival and realized they’d also get a chance to heckle a city council member. “I used to live in Idaho. A one-light town. But that light was event controlled, not time controlled! Are you telling me that we can’t get event-controlled lights out on North Temple Street while I’m going to work? It’s taken way too long. A one-light town! One light!”

  Or: “I knew a man in Springville, Illinois. Jared Ellenberger. He was a fine citizen and never really got his due. I was proud to know him. Have any of you ever heard of Jared?”

  “Where would we have heard of him?” asked the chair.

  “In Springville.”

  Or: “I’ve been hearing that the lights from the soccer field are making it harder for some people in that neighborhood to get to sleep at night. Can’t we turn them off earlier? I don’t even live in that neighborhood, but I’m getting tired of hearing about it. Thank you.”

  By the time the chair announced me, several people were dozing off. My manager wanted me to report on the exciting things we were working on at the library. Because there weren’t any, I said:

  “Can I ask you all a question?” I took their stares as a yes. “One thing I’ve never seen at the library is all of you. I might have seen your kids, but I never see you. Why is that? What could we do better?”

  “It doesn’t even feel like a library in there.” “The computers are too old.” “I’m scared to walk through the parking lot at night.” “I saw someone with a gun in the garden.”

  The chairperson raised her hand. “Are you aware that there is a soccer field behind the library?” I was. And it was too brightly lit, all night long. “That soccer field gets used all the time by people who don’t even live in this county.”

  “Or even this country!” I couldn’t tell who said it. “They come over from other areas just to mess up that field. They don’t come to clean up their own garbage, that’s for sure. But I understand why they don’t get it. Why, I saw a kid the other day just pull down his pants and pee right on the ground. That’s how they do it in their country, anyways. Right there on the ground.”

  I sat down.

  The next morning I was on desk when a wrinkled hand skittered over my own. “I’m sorry if I rattled you last night,” said the chairperson, “but I’m here to talk about something else right now. Those restrooms you’ve got are absolutely atrocious. I mean there’s just a mess everywhere you look.”

  That was true. We had some messy patrons.

  “But I’ve got a solution for you,” she said. “I’m not just some complainer. It’s because of the Mexicans. They don’t have to clean up after themselves back home, so we can’t really blame them for not doing it here. So what I did is, I went and made a big sign and put it in the ladies’ room. It says, ‘Please clean up after yourselves.’”

  “Ma’am, we can’t put that sign up just like—”

  “Oh, I know, don’t worry, I made one in Spanish too.” She was gone as soon as she had come, rustling out the door. I went to the ladies’ room and knocked. When nobody answered, I went inside.

  There was no sign in English or Spanish.

  Library school was uninspiring. I spent the first twelve days of it in Denton, Texas. The rest was online.

  The professor arrived late to the first class. She looked like she’d spent the entire night rolling downhill in a car, after which someone had pushed her out onto the steps of the school and said, “Now, get in there. You’ve got a lecture to teach. Braless. In a green crocheted sleeveless top that can only just encompass your fulsome gifts. And keep your energy up.”

  To stay stoked and regather her wits, she swigged from a one-liter bottle of Dr Pepper while lecturing about how neat databases were. She interrupted herself periodically to eat a Pop-Tart straight from the box.

  I didn’t sleep well in Denton. My pillow was stiff and it smelled rubbery. I stripped the pillowcase. The blue rubber underneath was stamped with the words “Texas Correctional Institute.”

  Oh, and I read Maus by Art Spiegelman in a Graphic Novels class during my library school studies through the University of North Texas. Besides a great hamburger place I found in Denton, it was the most worthwhile part of that expensive program.

  If you don’t look up when you enter the Main Library in Salt Lake City, it’s easy to miss the enormous hanging sculpture dangling between floors 3 and 2. The many thin black wires hanging from the ceiling form the shape of a large head. This is the sculpture Psyche, a creation of two Boston artists: Ralph Helmick and Stu Schechter. “Psyche” is the Greek word for “butterfly”; it literally means “spirit, breath, life, or animating force.”

  Each wire terminates in a small sculpture: nearly fifteen hundred butterflies and books. Some of the butterflies actually flutter their wings, prompted by a mild electrical current. Many have writing on their wings, in twenty different languages, quoting phrases from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

  Article 18: Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.

  Article 19: Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

  From Article 26: Everyone has the right to education.

  Article 27: Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.

  If your Greek mythology is rusty, here’s the least you need to know about Psyche: She was the Greek goddess of the soul. Eros, at the behest of his lovely but insecure mother, Aphrodite, snuck into Psyche’s bedchamber one night, intending to shoot her with one of his amorous arrows. When she woke, she’d fall in love with the first thing she saw: a hideous creature that Aphrodite would place in her room. But Eros accidentally scratched himself with the arrow and fell in love with her instead.

  Eros had entered Psyche’s room with a vengeful mission, but exited with a soul. An appropriate starting point when walking through these doors.

  The Main Library owns over one million items. At any time half of those are on the shelves, and half are checked out. If patrons returned every item at once, we’d be in trouble. But that won’t happen: The Main Library circulated over four million items in 2011—b
ooks, CDs, DVDs, VHS tapes, and art prints.

  One million is a number so big I can’t visualize it. And I know what five hundred thousand items looks like, because that’s how many are here with me at work. Among the books, movies, and CDs, let’s imagine that every item takes up, on average, half an inch of space on the shelves. The Empire State Building is 1,250 feet tall. That’s only thirty thousand items from the library stacked on top of each other. That means that if you stacked everything this library owns, you’d have a stack the height of approximately thirty-three Empire State Buildings.

  I love to tell kids that everything in the library is theirs. “We just keep it here for you.” One million items that you can have for free! A collection that represents an answer to just about any question we could ask. A bottomless source of stories and entertainments and scholarly works and works of art. Escapist, fun trash and the pinnacles of the high literary style. Beavis and Butt-Head DVDs and Tchaikovsky’s entire oeuvre within ten feet of each other. Every Pulitzer Prize–winning book and National Book Award winner. Picture books for children. An enormous ESL collection for learning English as a second language. Art prints you can borrow and put on your wall for a month. A special-collections area of rare books. Full runs of ephemera from The New York Times to the original Black Panther newsletters.

  If I could bring my bed, expand the fitness room, and kick everyone out, I wouldn’t need to pursue Heaven in the next world. I’d be there. But since the circulation statistics keep rising, our patrons are probably here to stay.

  Not everyone who visits borrows something. We try to hook them with programs and classes instead. In July 2011, the six Salt Lake City libraries put on 138 programs. In June, it was 162. Three hundred programs in two months. Our publicity department says the library system has approximately twenty-two hundred programs a year, from tango lessons to computer mouse usage to a travel lecture by Rick Steves or a program about Tourette Syndrome (I’ll give you one guess who hosted it). The staff of three hundred creates these programs with the community in mind. What do they want? What do they need? What would they want to learn? What would they enjoy that they may never have heard of? What would just be fun?

  And once you’re here, if you start asking questions, you’ll probably find a librarian you’ll bond with. The employees are too smart, strange, and interesting to resist.

  Those four million circulations represent people taking action. Four million acts. Four million times that someone got something from the library. Even if the circulation simply means that someone requested something on her computer, came in and picked it up, then left right away, she still came. She still used the service. She still took a chance on getting distracted by something else in the building.

  The four million small acts lead to members of the community gathering in the same place. People who might never lay eyes on one another elsewhere. In this digital era when human contact sometimes feels quaint to me, this is significant. If libraries themselves become quaint because they house physical objects and require personal interaction at times, so be it. For that reason, I believe physical libraries always need to exist in some form.

  Recently a man approached the desk. He dragged a dolly behind him, his possessions fixed to it with bungee cords. His gray beard was a mad tangle. He reminded me of one of the ancient, shambling seers prognosticating on so many pages of Cormac McCarthy’s novels. He wore a look that I didn’t recognize as wonder until he said, “I never could have imagined a place like this in Nicaragua. I’ve been traveling for a long time, to this country. I hope you know what you have. In my towns, we had nothing like this. And if we did, we had to pay for any information. And just because we were willing to pay for it didn’t mean there was anything there worth reading. It just wasn’t allowed. It took me a long time. It was worth it.”

  I shook his hand. “That’ll certainly be the best thing I’ll hear today.”

  He smiled. “I hope you know what you have here. It’s a miracle.”

  In A Prayer for Owen Meany, the hapless, doubt-plagued, stuttering Pastor Merrill tells the narrator, John Wheelwright, “But miracles don’t c-c-c-cause belief—real miracles don’t m-m-m-make faith out of thin air; you have to already have faith in order to believe in real miracles.” The man from Nicaragua was right. I had faith in the library long before he walked in and told me what I already knew: A library is a miracle. A place where you can learn just about anything, for free. A place where your mind can come alive.

  In George Orwell’s essay “A Hanging,” he describes his experience as an imperial policeman in Burma, walking a prisoner to his execution. As they approach the gallows, the prisoner, a small brown Hindu, sidesteps to avoid a puddle.

  When I saw the prisoner step aside to avoid the puddle, I saw the mystery, the unspeakable wrongness, of cutting a life short when it is in full tide.

  This was a man, like him. A man of tissue, organs, bones, muscle and, one would hope, a man who had dreams of something better for himself. Then comes the line I can’t forget:

  He and we were a party of men walking together, seeing, hearing, feeling, understanding the same world; and in two minutes, with a sudden snap, one of us would be gone—one mind less, one world less.

  For Orwell, the loss of a life was the loss of a mind was the loss of a world, and the world we inhabit is poorer for each loss, for the contributions that mind could have made.

  As a librarian, saving lives and worlds isn’t in my purview, although if I could put those on my résumé with a straight face, I would. Saving minds, however…perhaps it’s not as farfetched. A mind can be lost without its owner’s death. A mind that no longer questions only fulfills the rudimentary aspects of its function. A mind without wonder is a mere engine, a walking parasympathetic nervous system, seeing without observing, reacting without thinking, a forgotten ghost in a passive machine.

  The mind that asks and experiments and evaluates will die one day, but will provide a richer life for its owner. The mind that does nothing but rest inside the brain doesn’t sidestep the puddle. It’s sitting in it.

  I inhabit my own world. You inhabit yours. We still share space on earth and so, in some small fashion, have the potential to alter one another. To better one another’s lives. At its loftiest, a library’s goal is to keep as many minds as possible in the game, past and present, playful and in play.

  But the road to that happy thought is blighted with ruts and twists. Most reality is harsh; it’s easy to lose sight of the Big Picture nobility of libraries in light of the small picture.

  I loved my job from the beginning, although any romantic notions of being a purveyor of knowledge were soon interred beneath the duties of community council meetings, monitoring of the mentally ill, surrogate parenting, gang and drug activity tracking, and the myriad other realities of being a librarian (at least in this library) today.

  The surrogate parenting scares me. When I was managing the Day-Riverside branch I had several parents who worked two jobs ask if they could leave their kids there for “seven or eight hours.” These were generally eight-year-old kids or older but too young to be dropped off during a work shift. And sometimes these poor kids had toddler siblings with them.

  “I’d prefer you didn’t,” I’d tell the parents. “This isn’t a safe place.”

  “What! What do you mean?”

  “I mean it’s for the public, and that means everyone. We’re not cops or babysitters and sometimes there are going to be people in here that you might not want your kids hanging out with. But it’s up to you. I’m not telling you what to do. I just want to make sure you know how it is. We can’t watch your kids.”

  Reactions vary. “But I have to work, what am I supposed to do?” “Oh, you just don’t want to help us.” “I’m not asking you to babysit, just help them find some books today while they’re here…” (For an entire day?) If the parents insist, there’s nothing we can do, unless the child’s behavior becomes an issue, which can happen when the p
oor kid doesn’t eat anything for seven or eight hours.

  As far as gangs, it’s been hard for me to know what we should be concerned about. I don’t know who’s in a gang and who’s not. Between patrons whose equanimity deserts them when it’s time to talk about race and talkative security guards who love inserting themselves into tales of heroism, it’s easy to think that I work in a city-funded version of Don Pendleton’s action-packed Executioner novels. From my extensive experience watching The Wire, I suspect that the real gangsters are probably out on corners somewhere, or asleep while I’m working…not in the library watering their Farmville crops.

  But then a patron will say, “There’s a guy in a red bandanna over there and he said he’s going to stab me—oh please where can I hide?” and then a guy in a red bandanna appears and stalks around looking angry, and I’m wondering if I should err on the side of caution or outright paranoia. (That time, I did what we always do: called security. I don’t know what else happened). We aren’t trained to deal with those situations; the guards are. Unfortunately, with the five floors, hordes of patrons, and two security guards, they’re harried and hectored and overworked. I’m sure they’re also underpaid. They should make twice what librarians make. I recently talked to a guard who was bitten on the thigh by a patron we all thought was very sweet. This was a week after that same guard had asked a man to stop talking so loudly on a pay phone. The guy threw scalding coffee at his crotch. It took both officers to get him into cuffs. His pockets were full of drugs. And so on. Most of the libraries’ training programs involve things like “smiling warmly,” “going the extra mile,” “being approachable,” and “oh no, call the guards!” There’s nothing about knowing where to get an AIDS test after a soft-spoken patron bites your thigh so hard that your fluids mingle.

  We deal with these situations—which are rare, but too disturbing to forget—by wrapping ourselves in the mantle of the “public” part of “public library.” It’s for everyone. And all of their multiple personalities. There’s nothing funny about mental illness but being scared by disturbing behavior doesn’t make me insensitive, either. Until a behavior escalates to the abusive or biting or scalding-coffee level, we have little actionable information in terms of getting people that scare us out of the building. The guy who has now called me a “tall bigot” or “fucking Jew” twice in the last two years still comes in every day and asks me to find books for him.