Librarians

Catching a Moment With History (Day 42)

First director, Frances Griffin, c. 1900, and your current humble servant, below - with a century and two decades between us!

I’ve never been alone in a library until I started working at one. If you ever have a chance to do so, I recommend it.

In particular, in our little, historic library, our main room used to belong to our founder Sebastian Griffin, who used it originally as a space for his collection of artifacts, items, books and other interests. His Victorian era man-cave if you will.

On a rare Monday, as I wait for a late meeting to begin, I take the opportunity to spread out in Sebastian’s old room to catch up on some paperwork, but I keep being distracted by the quiet.

Libraries are no longer quiet spaces. They shouldn’t be. During our open hours, our library certainly isn’t. But tonight it is, so I lean back and listen.

I listen for the sound of Sebastian tinkering with his collection of arrowheads or rattle snake rattles. I listen for the sounds of our first librarian creaking open the front door toward Sucker Brook across the street. I wonder what the sounds of the flood in the 1930s must have been like that nearly swept the library away. Or that time that thieves crawled under the library and drilled a hole in the floor to get in. I listen for the sound of that shovel entering the dirt back when the first bathroom and plumbing arrived.

Tomorrow morning, when the children begin arriving for story time and we get our weekly crate of books our patrons have ordered from other libraries, it’ll be more difficult to hear these whispers, to listen to the echoes of a library that has dug itself so deeply into this community.

But I can hear them tonight. Or maybe it’s just Sebastian’s ghost.

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The You Voted For It Series: Coming in tied for second after your votes was Librarians. There’s quite a few other library essays in the archives as well! We’ll continue this series over the next couple days with our third and fourth place theme winners. I hope you enjoy and thank you for telling me what to write about.

Meantime, since the subject meant something to you all, tell us what your library experiences are. What’s your local library? Do you remember going to the library as a kid? Do you recall the library ghosts?

Meantime, thanks for the suggestions, the reading, the shares and, of course, the kind donations to Day By Day. Onward!