The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears

The Dreaded Librarian recently had the great privilege of having dinner with author Dinaw Mengestu following a reading he did at the local liberal arts college. He is an Ethiopian-American writer who has been listed as one of "the top 20 authors under 40." His two books, "The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears," and "How to Read the Air," have received plenty of praise for their prose and captivating stories. 

Despite working at a library, there are very few authors who I have met. I remember being in 5th grade and realizing that I wanted to be a writer, and that dream stuck with me through all of high school and even into college. My aspirations, though unrealistic, involved being a published novelist by age 16, writing and illustrating a childrens' book, and majoring in creative writing in college. Alas, none of these dreams have reached maturation, and yet my dream of some day meeting and talking with a real live author has been blissfully achieved.

Mr. Mengestu lead an informal writing discussion with several teenage aspiring writers, and his words were both motivational and inspirational. What I liked most about him is that he lacked the pretentious air that I expected to come with fame, and rather spoke with calm strength and down-to-earth wisdom. He was intrigued by our community and the incredibly unexpected diversity found within such a small and run-down city. My library kids were very excited to ask him about his life and his books, trying to find commonalities between their African refugee background and his Ethiopian immigration stories.

 

Overall, the visit was an incredible experience (for both the youth and myself!), and now that I am in the midst of one of his books (rather belated, I know) I can also highly recommend picking one up and reading it. I am currently wrapping up "The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears" and have found his writing beautifully lyrical, with strong imagery and a slow, relaxed sense of melancholia. Get to your local library and check it out-- literally!

Tandem Troubles

Sometimes trouble just finds you regardless of how hard you try to avoid it. It's like dank, oppressive humidity, enveloping and suffocating you after you smile at the sunshine on a lovely day. It hits out of nowhere and leaves you splayed on the sidewalk, gasping with heat stroke like a hooked trout in the day's fresh catch basket.

Trouble. I needed it yesterday as much as I needed a plume of tobacco smoke blown in my face from some sucker puffing on a cancer stick. I needed it like appendicitis. Heck, I needed it like a cliche punch in the face! But despite my plans for a quiet day at the library, I found myself faced with a face-smashing bowl of trouble.

It all started when a late night turned into an early weekend morning with a sore throat that could only have been sent by someone as sinister as Shakespear's Iago. Clawing my throat out would have seemed like a mere insect bite in comparison to the endless flaming pain of this latest enemy of my immune system. Yet I tried desperately to ignore it, to pretend it was a slight case of "dehydration" or "seasonal allergies" even though I've never experienced an allergic reaction in my life. I tried to tell myself that dreaded librarians don't get sick-- they just don't. But on those little bacteria marched, destroying my throat, progressing to my lungs within 24 hours, and leaving me coughing until my ribs ached.

Now, any normal person would probably stay home and just wait it out. However, my work ethic is like an iron bar, and the only reason I could legitimize for taking a sick day was that I didn't want to infect others with this bacterial culture brewing in the petri dishes of my inflamed alveoli. I did contemplate staying home sick, but since it is school vacation week and I knew that I would be spending the entirety of the day behind a closed door in the privacy of my office with limited exposure to other individuals, I decided to muck through some paperwork and catch up on all the office duties I've been so negligent about. Thus, my troubles began.

After a few hours, I left my office to meet a friend for lunch. We were to meet at 1:15 at the Indian restaurant down the street, but as I was leaving my office at 1:12 I realized with mortification that I had forgotten my debit card in the pocket of my other pair of pants (where I had tucked it the night before while attending an Iron & Wine concert), and living up to my notorious habit of never having cash on hand, I was faced with a dilemma: I could either go to the restaurant and be on time, but ashamedly ask my friend to cover my lunch with a promised I-owe-you, or I could run back to my apartment to get my debit card to relieve myself from being a mooch, but continue to develop a bad habit of being late. I opted for the latter and started running up the street.

I arrived at my apartment at approximately 1:15, found the card within thirty seconds, and was dashing out the door by 1:16, at which point I spotted by bicycle waiting, beckoning for me on the landing outside the door. Without a second thought, I threw it over my shoulder and carried it out the door where I proceeded to hop onto it and speed towards the Indian restaurant. I arrived barely three minutes late, praising myself for being smart enough to avoid being a mooch or being terribly tardy. I placed by bike against a tree by the side window of the restaurant and then BAM! I realized with horror that I had forgotten my bike lock. But again, the desire to save my reputation outweighed my thoughts of returning home to retrieve my bike lock, and I thought to myself, "Well, we won't be inside long, and my bike will be in full view of our table the whole time. I'm sure it will be fine." I'm sure you see where this is going. Obviously my bike got stolen and my reputation became that of a careless dolt, which is far worse than that of being a tardy mooch. Thus, my tandem troubles of horrendous illness and bike theft rolled together into one of the worst days of the past year.

I'm fairly convinced that I won't see my lavender road bike (named Luna Pisces Moonbeam) again, unless the dreaded librarian rears her crime-fighting head once more in a serious case of revenge-seeking investigative work. Firstly, she must wait in frustration for this cold to leave her lungs, and then...

Luna Pisces Moonbeam

TO BE CONTINUED...

 

The Mad Crapper

Public bathrooms have long been my cold, dark, nemesis. They seep with discomfort, some more reminiscent of a Dark Ages torture chamber anything else.There are the usual misdemeanors: derogatory graffiti written in stolen Sharpie marker; phone numbers, names and dates etched into walls in pointy lettering; soggy toilet paper littering the corners waiting to get stuck to unsuspecting shoes; and of course the odd smells and stains that beg the question, “What happened here?”

Ah yes, the joys of public bathrooms, with all their lurking shadows, drips and creaks. Yet, surprisingly, none of these offenses have anything to do with my dislike and outright horror towards public restrooms: Until I went to college and discovered a few dorms and buildings with single-stall, unisex facilities, I thought all public restrooms were highly gendered and uncomfortable places wrought with hard feelings.  From childhood to adulthood, exploring the intricacies of public restroom norms has been an exercise in tolerance, terror, and courage.  In many ways, working in a public library has furthered my education of restroom etiquette (or lack thereof) in ways that are so grotesque you’ll probably think I’m making them up. If only that were the case...

As a child, I was terrified of the rest stop bathrooms on highways. Just think about it-- you’re 6 years old, 3 feet tall, and you walk into a giant maze of stalls with your adult monitor (aka parent or other legal guardian). It’s overwhelming! Inside the stall, there are rolls of toilet paper bigger than your head set inside giant plastic dispensers with jagged teeth that never tear the paper off correctly. On the opposite wall a little bit of tissue paper peaks out of the bottom of another strange-shaped dispenser (“That’s the seat cover,” mom later explains. You decide not to mention that you thought it was toilet paper). Plus, in the women’s bathrooms there are those darn metal boxes for disposing of feminine items, which as a child pose yet another mystery. When you ask about them, the best answer you get is, “You’ll find out when you’re older. Let’s go!”

And everything runs on sensors.

There you are, sitting on that cold seat in a mustard-yellow stall covered in phone numbers and obscene messages trying to squeeze your bladder dry before another three hours on the road. From beneath the door you catch a glimpse of what appear to be hundreds of feet right outside, waiting for you to finish. It takes a while for you to get over your ‘stage fright,’ but when you finally do and the satisfying sound of water-on-water begins, you shift your weight the slightest bit to get more comfortable and suddenly--

WHOORSSSHHHHHHHH GLUG GLUG GLUG SHHHHHHHHHHH

--so deafening that it sounds like a whirlpool has opened beneath you and you’re going to get sucked down into the depths of the sewer forever to live in the company of the alligators you heard about from the other kids at school!  After the terror subsides (and after you’ve lurched off the toilet in an attempt to save yourself from the sewers), you realize that the whirlpool was, surprisingly, just the toilet flushing itself. But you didn’t even touch the handle! Ah, those pesky sensors that you are now beginning to be enlightened about. Such a strange, terrifying place! You continue to be amazed after you exit the stall and head over to the sinks where your public bathroom sensor education is fulfilled. The electronic sinks, soap and towel dispensers seem to possess a miraculous ability to wash and dry your hands with almost no personal effort. What a strange, terrifying place indeed!

Obviously I am no longer afraid of public bathrooms for the same reasons as a child.  Unfortunately, with age bathrooms became even more horrific. There was middle school, when every girl would cram in front of the mirrors before school to apply make-up, and then cram in again at the end of the day to wash it off before going home. An innocent bystander like myself could get trampled to death in the stampede if they weren’t careful.  And it was around those middle school years when kids first began finding it humorous to write scrawled messages like “there’s a BOMB in the TOILET” on the walls for the custodians to find, causing an immediate forced evacuation of the school. This would only become a more frequent event as school progressed.

Then there was high school when navigating the bathrooms required a degree in high school hierarchy systems: the potheads owned the second floor bathroom, the cheerleaders claimed the one by the front stairwell, the drama geeks used the cafeteria stalls to rehearse during lunch, and the one in the science wing always smelled like a noxious perfume of formaldehyde, lighter fluid and rotting potatoes.  As an unsuspecting and rather unpopular “outsider,” I had the unpleasant experience of walking in on girly gossip in the “wrong bathroom,” and being given the angry eye until I left. On several occasions, I’d push open an unlocked stall door in the lady’s room and find a popular couple (the type waiting to be nominated “Prom King and Queen”) making out with such fierce passion you’d think the world was about to end. Add to that the fact that our school was so old that most of the stalls were missing their doors, and it just made infinitely more sense to hold it until school was out.

And then college changed everything.. Suddenly alcohol was a readily available addition to the public bathroom horrors. Girls would vomit their guts out while sobbing hysterically over the porcelain god about some boy and/or sociology paper due the next day; socially active students surveyed all bathrooms on campus and determined that handicap accessible and gender neutral bathrooms were discriminately few and far between; and bathrooms housed the perfect “hook-up” location for couples seeking solitude from their roommates. When I studied abroad I also had my first peek at pub and bar restrooms, and while I found the drunken mob of female strangers surprisingly supportive of one another, I still couldn’t help but notice that all of the gossip centered exclusively around boy troubles-- jealousy, resentment, cheating, lying. The supportive circle of female restroom users was a necessity to counter the excessive negative vibes loosened by liquor!

When I finally joined the working world, having experienced and dealt with many of my public bathroom demons, I suddenly found myself exposed to “the other side” of the restroom story: the side that deals with the complaints and maintenance of said restrooms. People frequently come up to the Reference Desk and make remarks about the condition of the bathroom:

“Just thought you might like to know that there’s some really offensive graffiti in there.”

“That bathroom’s flooded, someone stuffed paper towels down the sink and left the water on.”

“The smell in there is unreal! That bathroom should be out of order until you guys get some air freshener! I coulda passed out and hit my head on the sink, man.”

And so a maintenance report is filed and the offensive graffiti is painted over again, the young person who flooded the bathroom is suspended because of the extensive damage to books caused by the water leaking through the floor to the bookstacks below, and a canister of air freshener is replaced only to be stolen the following day. These acts become the routine.

What scares me most is when the routine is broken.

We’ve had some scandalous and almost unbelievable things happen in the restroom on the Reference Floor. Reverting back to one of the examples above, when the bathroom was flooded, I almost didn’t understand how such an incident could happen. Why would anyone plug the sink with paper towels, turn the water on and leave? Sure, maybe it gets a laugh from a few friends, but is it really worth the 6 month library suspension? Unfortunately, it is for many of our patrons.  It’s also a routine occurrence for the elevator to be used as a urinal by mischievous youth looking for a laugh.

There was even one day when I was working on the Teen Banner project (described in a previous post) when an older youth tipped me off to the fact that amateur nose piercing was raging through the high school like wildfire. I didn’t think much of it until I looked around and realized that several girls who had just been working on the banner had disappeared rather suddenly, and after a quick sweep of the Reference floor they were nowhere to be found. It was about at that moment that I noticed several voices emanating from the public restroom and approached the door. I knocked and the voices fell silent instantaneously.

“Anyone in there?” I hollered, knocking again. “I’m coming in!”  

At which point a young girl, only 12, opened the door and exited, turning the light off behind her. “Sorry, I was just washing my hands,” she said innocently. Unfortunately for her, she didn’t fool me for a second. I switched the light back on to find 5 teenage girls all huddled by the sink holding needles they had stolen from the sewing project they had been working on in the Teen Room. Two sported small gems in their reddened noses, painfully obvious new additions to their faces.

Being the teen-savvy librarian I am, I refrained from harsh scolding and instead focused on safety.

“Ladies, this really isn’t the place to be doing this, but since I caught you... are you disinfecting your needles? If you took them from the Teen Room--”

“No, we didn’t steal them!”

“--then they’re probably covered in germs from all the kids who have been touching them. I definitely saw someone’s little brother sneeze into his hands and then use some of those needles.”

“Ewwwwww, oh my god did you make sure you burned that before shoving it through my nose?? Who has the lighter??” A flurry of worried voices chimes in and some girl mutters something like, “I forgot the lighter, but I’m sure it’s ok. We wiped it off first...”

“And I don’t want you to get in trouble with your parents. If you’re reverting to piercing each other in the public library bathroom, I assume your family doesn’t know you are doing this. I’m not going to tell on you, don’t worry, you guys should think about this, ok? I know I’m not one to talk [since my nose is pierced] but I waited until I was 18 to get mine done, and did it at a piercing parlor where everything was sanitized.” I paused a second for effect while looking around the bathroom sketchily before continuing. “I’m sure you realize this already, but this is definitely not a sanitary place.” The girls glanced around too, and the young 12 year old mumbled, “Eww, is that poop on the wall??”

Mind you, we do have a fantastic cleaning crew that scrubs the place down thoroughly, but everyday wear-and-tear seems to be particularly rough. Just yesterday an older gentleman suffering from incontinence literally ran up to the desk and started shouting rather incoherently that he needed the bathroom NOW, GOD DAMN IT! and the poor librarian at the desk had to essentially evacuate the person who was in there to make way for this man, who was already peeing himself by the time he entered the restroom.  In the afternoons, the bathroom gets particularly messy and slippery because many of the youth who attend homework help are Muslim, and they must wash their hands and feet in the sink (which is quite messy as you can imagine, leaving puddles of water on the floor) before the afternoon prayer. Yes, the everyday wear-and-tear is quite extensive!

There is one final anecdote that must be shared in order for you to fully understand my disgust of public restrooms, but which also merits a good amount of humor just in time for April Fool’s day.  While I was not ‘blessed’ with the opportunity to see this first-hand, I heard a detailed description from my coworker who described it, laughingly, as “the most disgusting thing [he’d] ever seen.” It took a while to figure out who the culprit was, but thanks to our security cameras we managed to fill in many of the missing details. Here’s how events played out:

A patron approached the desk with a horrified look of shock on his face. He simply stated, “You need you place that bathroom out of order. It’s definitely unusable.”

My coworker thanked the patron and said to me, “I’ll go check it out before we put up the sign. A lot of the time it just needs to be plunged a bit.”

Less than a minute later, he emerged from the bathroom with a bemused but disgusted look on his face and remarked, “That’s the most disgusting thing I’ve ever seen in my whole life.” He then proceeded to describe the state of the toilet-- a paperback book had been spread open in the toilet, cover-side up, so that all of the pages became saturated with toilet water. The culprit had then proceeded to take a shit (“the biggest dump I’ve ever seen!!” he said) on top of the book, and had flushed the toilet several times so that the saturated pages dissolved a bit and swirled around in the nearly-overflowing toilet bowl. The whole mess had completely blocked up the system and musked the air with a thick stench that rendered the bathroom unusable for the next two days.

The librarians colloquially referred to the culprit as “The Mad Crapper,” and set off on a mission to identify him. After reviewing several hours of video footage, we finally noticed a suspicious patron who entered the bathroom holding what appeared to be a book. When he exited, the item was no longer in his hands, and he had a maniacal grin on his face. A police report was filed for destruction of library property (the book) and a suspension put in place in response to the poor behavior.

The episode definitely solidified my negative opinion of public bathrooms; they abound with mischievous misdemeanors, poor etiquette, and repulsive acts. Yet I found myself realizing that I no longer was afraid of them. Sure, they are uncomfortable places that I try to avoid at all times, but  I now have a new respect for the endless humor they provide to this unsuspecting, public-bathroom-hating librarian.

Yes, as sick as it was, I couldn’t help but chuckle at the Mad Crapper. His seemingly senseless behavior led to the disgusting and horrific destruction of a book, but he had a sense of humor (albeit a twisted one).

Admittedly, this was one of the most creative book reviews I’d ever heard of.  

MJ Returns!

No, I'm not talking about Michael Jackson. Rather, I realized it's been over a week since my last post (gasp!) and although I have several longer pieces in the works, none are ready to be posted yet. Thus, I racked and racked my brain for the most exciting thing to have happened this week. It was as I was thus straining my brain during a maple sugar induced coma (hey, it's Maple Sunday and we visited two sugar shacks!) I realized that something quite out of the ordinary DID occur, as mundane as it may seem! 

Flying high--kite season is upon us!

Perhaps you have already guessed, but when I say "MJ Returns" I am, indeed, speaking of the the "holy marijuana" lady from my previous post!!! It has been nearly a year since the holy marijuana episode occurred, and just recently I was speaking with someone about how I have not seen the woman since. She must have sensed my thoughts because the very next day I walked out of the Teen Room and there she was, waiting at the Reference Desk for someone to help her find books on Wicca spells and Paganism. I wish I could report that she was hollering and having a fit like last year, but she was shockingly calm (though perhaps a bit vacant, as before), and once she received the books she needed she sat down quietly in a chair and began reading through them. The only thing slightly out-of-the-ordinary was when I noticed her quietly chanting to herself while rubbing a tattoo on her forearm. For a brief moment my imagination turned her into the vacant, stumbling zombie of last year, sitting in a chair clawing at her arm amidst a screen of murky fog and scowling with reddened eyes at the book in her lap. Her hair became gnarled and patchy, her teeth yellowed, and a greenish tinge seeped into the coloration of her face. And just as quickly, the vision was gone-- replaced once again by the quiet, chanting woman by a window in the library. Such an anticlimactic, mundane and unfulfilling incident, yet such a chance encounter! 

Little does this woman know that she is infamous amongst my circle of friends...

Repeat Offenders: Put That Away!

Time to play a little game. Imagine it’s a weekday morning, a bit brisk but the sun is warm. Spring is in the air and as you walk to work (at the public library) you can’t help but look up at the blue sky and smile at the city doves overhead. In the distance you hear the faint sound of laughter and smile as a warm breeze combs through your hair. Ahhh, you think, what a delightful morning.

Yes indeed, what a delightful morning it is! There’s a spring to your step as you turn the lock to the back door and bounce up the steps to the Reference floor. You smile at your coworkers and exchange sincere, “Good morning!” messages before passing through the public computer lab to your office. You sit down, open your computer and set to work catching up on correspondences, tracking program participation, and updating the monthly program stats. You begin to hear a quiet, steady flow of people entering the library, the beeping of the computer reservation station, and the soothing clickety-click-clack-click of keys typing away next door. Occasionally a cell phone will ring or the muffled sound of music through headphones can be heard coming from the lab, but for the most part all is calm.

Around mid-morning, you decide to take a short tea break. You grab your mug, put your computer into “sleep” mode, stand up and walk out of your office. Out of habit, you glance around at the faces in the public computer lab with a friendly smile--

And then you see it.

Any semblance of a smile disappears when you notice the screen filled with close-up images of amateur hardcore pornography: a grainy video maximized across the entire monitor displaying a side view of some overly-busty woman’s gyrating butt cheeks slapping together to the rhythm of some paunch-bellied dude’s vigorous thrusts. It’s a ‘deer in the headlights’ moment where you freeze, confused, and can’t seem to tear your eyes away even though your brain is churning a million miles per hour trying to process and respond to what is taking place. You notice a baby in a stroller beside the offensive computer user; it coos a little bit and spits up on itself. You follow suit and vomit a little in your mouth.

At my library, we do not have any filters in place (except for in the Children’s Department) because they sometimes will filter out the ‘wrong’ websites. For example, if someone is trying to research the long-term psychological effects of, say, child sex slavery (a recent homework assignment for some of the high school health students), the combination of “child” and “sex” search terms may bring up some academic articles, but presumably many inappropriate websites as well. A filter may not accurately tell the difference between the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ sites and could block them all. Thus, in order to give the public the best access to any and all mind-enriching information, we function almost exclusively on an honor system. Each computer user has to accept the computer policy prior to beginning any computer session, and it is then their responsibility to use the computers appropriately. For the most part, staff do not ‘spy’ on computer users, but on occasion when we do notice illegal computer activity on the screen we will boot the offending user off with a warning.  A second offence warrants a temporary (30 day) computer ban, and following offences may receive heftier reprimands.

The challenge, of course, is that libraries are built around free access to information-- and personal privacy. Thus, records of ‘repeat offenders’ on the computers are not kept except mentally by staff. If we are aware that someone has looked at pornography two or three times, then we can act accordingly, but with hundreds of people passing through and using the computers each day it gets increasingly complicated to remember who has had one warning versus five.

So what do you do? There you are, gaping at a disgusting and demeaning video trying to figure out how to confront the offender. Maybe half a second passes, maybe less, but it feels like an hour. Then all of a sudden the offender seems to notice you and quickly minimizes the video to reveal another window--Facebook--as an innocent cover. You think to yourself, Do you really believe that I didn’t just see that? I know you weren’t looking at Facebook! How dumb do you think I am? And at that moment the offender catches your eye in an attempt to tell if you saw their little video or not. Apparently your face is very revealing because they quickly avert their eyes and slump lower in their chair like a guilty 15-year-old.

It’s always so awkward to approach these individuals and reprimand them publicly because they often protest and sometimes  revert to using derogatory language. It’s especially awkward to approach them if they are in the midst of some personal ‘heavy petting’ because, well, that’s just awkward in general! On a few occasions I’ve slipped back into my office and written brief notes that say:

Do you know it’s against library policy to look at pornography on the public computers? Not only that, but you can lose your library privileges. Please do not do it again.

I fold the note in half and drop it next to the offender’s keyboard as I walk past. I feel like making a personal connection like that-- the whole ‘I know you know that I know’ thing-- may be intimidating enough to at least make them take a break for a while. But the frustrating thing is that often people just don’t care. They’ll be back the next day watching their grainy videos and rubbing themselves ‘discretely’ in the public computer lab, no matter how many times staff talk to them, suspend their cards, or otherwise reprimand them.

There was one noteworthy incident where I was in my office when all of a sudden a loud commotion broke out in the computer lab. Some woman with an incredibly shrill voice started laying into a guy that she obviously observed engaged in inappropriate conduct:

“That’s fucking disgusting, this is a public library! I don’t want to come in here and see that shit every time I want to send an e-mail! You fucking lowlife, go hide in an ally and do that shit, don’t do it here!”

“What, I’m not doing anything,” was the man’s mumbled reply. It only sent the woman further into a frenzy.

“You most certainly are doing something! Every time I come in here you’re watching nasty ass pornography and rubbing your penis. I have my daughter with me, and she’s got to sit next to some pervert rubbing himself while I’m trying to print off my taxes. Fuckin’ sick, that’s what it is! You’ve got to be sick to be doing that shit here, fucking sick in the head.”

By this time, everyone in the computer lab had stopped typing and were obviously watching the antics. I wondered why no one at the Reference Desk had stepped in to mediate the situation, or at least get the two to quiet down. Then I realized that a fellow patron laying into this guy was probably more effective at embarrassing him than any of us librarians (who have probably warned him multiple times already) would have been. Thus, despite my natural impulse to step out of my office and quiet things down, I decided to let it run its course.

“Shut up, bitch, I’m not doing anything!”

“This is a LIBRARY! It’s posted in the rules that you can’t watch pornography in here! It’s a public place, pervert! There are kids in here, and I can’t sit by quietly while you’re grunting and rubbing yourself in front of not only my daughter, but all the people in this room!” Her voice was getting louder (if that was possible) and I could hear the man push back his chair and start putting his jacket on.

“Yeah that’s right, walk away, pretend nothing happened. I know you’ll be back in here tomorrow doing the same nasty ass shit. Fucking sick, this is a LIBRARY!”

The man mumbled something that sounded a lot like, “Fuck you, bitch,” as he exited the computer lab. The woman hollered after him, “Don’t forget to zip your fly!”

This whole incident was exceptionally loud, and after the man left it felt like a shocked quiet was suffocating the room. I almost expected everyone to start clapping after a brief pause, but no one did. Generally I get tense around direct confrontations, but this time I found myself almost ecstatic! I wanted to shout, “You go, girl! Thank you!” I knew exactly who she had been yelling at, and apparently her aggressive tone and public humiliation stint did a number on the guy, because he hasn’t been back to the library since.

So there you are, burning holes in the back of the offender’s head and contemplating your next move. Do you confront them verbally right then and there? Do you end their computer session immediately? Do you give them a warning?  If I was a fellow public computer lab user, I’d probably follow the lead of the woman above (to a lesser extent) and firmly ask the offender to put that shit away!

What would you do?

The Banner Project

This is the fabulous fabric banner that my kids are creating for permanent display at the library! This image was taken by a photographer from the local newspaper, and is just too splendid not to share. Each youth picks their own fabric background square and can add a collage of cloth words, shapes, textures and embellishments that they feel relates to their self identity. After a few more weeks of work, all of the pieces will be sewn together into a double-sided banner that will eventually be hung on display in the library. Fantastic work by a fantastic group of students! Reason number 5,395,350 why I love my job.

A Thanks to "My Kids"

They're not really mine, but I've come to affectionately refer to any teenage user of the library as one of "my kids." They come from all backgrounds, but the majority of them are from low socioeconomic statuses and many are recent immigrants to America. Some are homeless. Most fit in multiple minority and marginalized groups. All of them are priceless.

Each day I struggle to engage them, to find ways to relate to them, to find activities they enjoy. Each day they test my patience, push boundaries, act out, bounce up, stand strong. Each day they frustrate me and enlighten me.

Yesterday was my birthday, and when one of my friends at the library told a few individual students in the homework help lab, the kids apparently went into a frenzy. Several of them took the lead and decorated a poster board with a giant "Happy Birthday Molly!" message and proceeded to take the larger-than-life sized card around to everyone in homework help. I was oblivious, and was helping an English language learner stumble through some complicated passages of Barbara Kingsolver's "The Bean Trees" when a group of my kids snuck up behind me in a semi-circle. They were (shockingly!) quiet for once and the only thing that gave them away was a slight giggle from one of the younger girls. As I turned around, expecting to deliver a soft "hushhh" to the giggler, my eyes popped with surprise as 20 kids shouted "HAPPY BIRTHDAY MOLLY!" with the absolute sunniest smiles on their faces, collaboratively holding the large card out in front. 

I could not stop smiling. My day turned from a lovely day to an extraordinarily perfect day. I gave them all hugs and thanked them individually for making the card and surprising me, but I couldn't even begin to express the happiness in my heart. The only reason the tears didn't run down my face is because the sunshine bursting from within caused the tears to evaporate before they could fully form, and left a rainbow in their place. 

What I wish I had said to them:

Thank you for giving me the privilege to be part of your lives. You have all taught me so much. Thank you. Thank you. 

Thank you.