Eats Commas

NPR reported about the death of the Oxford comma (in its PR department, not in its stylebook) back at the end of June, and I missed that missive!  I can't believe that the news didn't make more of an impact.  I would have thought the ripples at least would have at least lapped up to the shore of Sacramento.  But, no.  We were blissfully ignorant of the Oxford dilemma.

I'm also surprised that the article didn't mention Lynn Truss' book, Eats, Shoots & Leaves since the whole point of the title was the comma.  Commas, it seems, are the maze of punctuation.  If a writer successfully solves the maze, readers are happy.  But should the writer stumble and get lost, readers immediately try to come to the author's aid or mock him/her for stupidity.  Either way, the author is left thinking the most important things in his/her book was a period with a tail.

Even more Librarilicious...

How can we look at his grades when we can look at HIM???

Saturdays in the library

All jobs have their ebb and flow.  Some parts of the year are busy, some slower.  The longer a person's in the job, the more familiar she gets with the rhythms.  Finding one's feet as a librarian is dancing in tune to the library's rhythm.

Saturdays at all the public libraries where I've worked were always the busiest days.  School-aged children were intent on getting their homework done, their parents beside them either helping or hindering.  Adults roamed the new book shelves and the video racks, eager for something to spark their interest.

Some Saturdays were so busy that we ended up putting older books on the new book shelves because all the new books had been checked out a half hour to hour after we opened.

At my local public library (Belle Cooledge Branch of the Sacramento Public Library) I've noticed Saturdays have brought out the turtle club, the gardeners' clubs, and other groups who use the community room to have sales or clinics.

All in all, I've noticed that Saturday is still a happening day at my branch of the public library.

Charles Starkweather, serial killer

When I was growing up in Lincoln, Nebraska, Charlie Starkweather was our garbage man, and when he went on his killing spree, our neighborhood took it personally and was scared out of its mind.

Until I worked at the Northeast Branch of the Lincoln Public Library, these facts were just something relegated to my childhood memories.

But in the summer of 1968, I worked as the substitute head librarian at the branch while Sammie, the branch's librarian, had her baby.

Northeast was a classic one-room Carnegie library with stained glass windows, a place that reminded me of being in a cathedral when the sun slanted through the windows in the late afternoon.  Standing at the librarian's desk and looking straight through the main door, the librarian had the children's area to the right and the adult's area to the left.

What's the point?

I've been working in libraries my entire life--starting as a page in the 1950s at the Lincoln (NE) Public Library System.  In 1969 I read Theodore Roethke's poem "Dolor."  The poem changed my life. 

Instead of enrolling in library school, I enrolled in the University of Nebraska's education program and then the theater program.  Like Roethke, in school and public libraries I'd "seen dust from the walls of institutions,/Finer than flour, alive, more dangerous than silica,/Sift, almost invisible, through long afternoons of tedium."  I didn't want my exciting future life to become covered in dust.

But libraries are the opiate of readers.  I couldn't stay away.