The librarian is retiring! The librarian is retiring!
The news upset me so bad I couldn’t even go in for three weeks after I heard it. She’s only been at her post for about six years or so, but what are we supposed to do without her? I walk in the door and she asks me if I’ve read the National Book Award-winning “The Yellow House” yet. She’s better than an eavesdropping electronic assistant for knowing what interests me most, and orders books for me in advance, just so I’ll have them when I recognize I need them.
I finally decided that civilized people, even mad and bereaved ones, go and visit, so I went in yesterday to see what she had to say for herself, and Martha the Retiring Librarian laughed and said she’s heard that kind of sentiment quite a bit since making her big announcement. She said she wants to retire, that retiring at age 65 is something she’s always wanted to do, and that the ticking clock on the wall showed it was time. She wants time to do things she wants to do. I didn’t feel that was a good enough reason and declared that it was a selfish one besides, but she dismissed my accusations with laughter. I think she was complimented by it or some such misinterpreted reaction.
Oh, we’ve had librarians before, but that doesn’t mean anything. Anybody can order a book, stock a shelf or send out a notice reminding you to return something you’ve had since last March but haven’t gotten around to reading yet, but not everybody bookworms their way into your literary head. Not every librarian knows what property in town you own and thus recognizes you might be interested in all the books written by a member of the family that owned the same house 100 years earlier. Martha’s got all of that. Martha pays attention.
Martha says we’ll get a new librarian. She even feels confident that she and the Library Committee are capable of hiring someone Ashfield will take to as well as we did her. Does she know how long it takes to get into this town? A long time! It’s taken me 14 years and I still have a number of hoops to jump through before I get my full-fledged Town Acceptance Certificate! If Martha runs back off to whatever town she lives in now, I don’t know what’ll happen to her reputation. Right now it’s spotless. Two months from now, it could all go south.
I’ll bet the librarians at the Library of Congress or the New York Public Library could run off and nobody’d even notice! (Don’t tell them I said that – I don’t want them to feel bad or useless.) But in a town the size of Ashfield, the library and its librarian are as important to the town as the hardware store is. Maybe the library doesn’t sell ice cream or have its own personal cat, but it has books that are written from a cat’s perspective and you’ll find any number of people in there in an afternoon who like ice cream and cats and Martha knows who’s who and connects us all up. Any town can have a library, but not every town has a librarian who invites you into her office behind the big desk to look up what books are out there that you don’t even know about yet. But that’s what Martha does.
I don’t know. I tried to talk her into staying, but she laughed again and said, no. She’s doing an awful lot of laughing for someone upsetting so many people.
You out there, go to your library today and take your librarian flowers or chocolate or a puppy or whatever it is they like, just to keep them anchored in place, knowing that they are loved and cared for, just as they love and care for you and your literary needs.
The smaller the town, the bigger the librarian. And if a woman named Martha Cohen wanders into your library looking for a job, having realized that free time is not all it’s made up to be, send her on back to Ashfield. We’ll stamp her right back in and won’t even charge a fine.
Nan Parati lives and works in Ashfield, where she found home and community following Hurricane Katrina. She can be reached at NanParati@aol.com.