Monday, September 30, 2013

My Little Library

Some places you just take for granted.  The grocery store.  The State House.  Your library.

I love my library.  I'm there once a week, usually Friday.  I get at least 3 books and a couple of movies, maybe a CD.  This month I've read Brady Udall's The Lonely Polygamist (I'm still not right.  Like really good writers, Brady writes about things you don't understand well enough you understand it viscerally) and now I'm working through James Rollins' The Blood Gospel (Can you accept vampires who take Jesus seriously?  I'll be thinking about that one for a while).

There's the main library and a few neighborhood centers.  But I love the main one.

I'm a sucker for opera and it's over-the-top emotionalism.  When I first heard Puccini I'd found a home.  And movies.  So I still check out The Lady Vanishes and every Cary Grant movie ever made.  The Thin Man movies left their mark as well.   And the dancers, particularly American boy Gene Kelly.  I marveled at Fred, but I loved Gene.

I can still find stuff that feeds my soul there.  I need something with a real story in it.  I need characters with good hearts capable of true love.  I like exotic locals and food I've never tasted before.  I cute my teeth on murder mysteries.  So I'm writing one now and I know that the thousand or so I've checked out will somehow shape my story.

So when Bev called me a few months ago and asked me to be a library ambassador, I was more than happy to help.  My job:  just tell people what a great place the library is and how much it matters in our community.  Easy peasy.

Last week, there was a little celebration to show off the ambassadors recognition wall.  Actually, a window.  Our names were painted on the spines of books—my favorite place.  I saw friends from my church, friends who were writers,  friends who worked in the hospital.  It is lively in a Dr. Suess sort of way.  Can you say More. Than. Pleased.  ???

My one library mishap:  One day I was having a chocolate attack.  You can have one of those just about any time.  And so I did.  I opened a little bag of M & M peanuts, poured them into a pocket and forgot they were there.   That is. . .  until I was deep in the fiction stack and leaned over to read the bottom shelf and all the little M & Ms fell out and rattled down the stacks.  They rattled the whole way across the room. A long, long ways.

So this week, Josh Groban is in town for a concert.  Yeah, that Josh Groban.  He'd captured the exclamation point at the end of  Library!, which was donated by our local pizza company.  The photo showed up on his web site today.

More. Than. Pleased.



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