The Library of Casual Conversations

Seeking Connection

Today, at the library, I had two conversations with patrons within about a half hour of each other. One had to do with being an electrical engineer at a studio when Aerosmith was just a local band and how their parents were helping them get a foothold in the music industry. The other was about rubber ducks for the Town Day and Duck Race sometimes getting away from their handlers and ending up in the lake weeks or even months later and the people who have to go out on the ice in the middle of winter when they reappear to scoop them up.

These were, of course, casual conversations so I won’t go into detail, but this sort of thing happens at a library every day. All the time. At least, it should happen if the library is a healthy one because - and I need to keep saying this - a library isn’t only about books.

A library is about connection to the community you serve, and this means to the people in that community. And if they want to come by and chew the fat for a while, so be it.

I had a talk recently with a patron who was asking about budgets and spreadsheets and all the paperwork required - sometimes by state statute - to run our little library. It’s all public record, of course (though it feels like the public doesn’t pay much attention to it) so I talked him through all the weekly, monthly and yearly numbers I have to keep track of.

“That doesn’t sound very important, ultimately,” he said pleasantly. I laughed.

Mostly, it is. Keeping track of what we do here is important because we need to be transparent and public about how we use community and state funds, along with donations and grants. Spreadsheets are a good way of showing all that.

But… and you knew there was going to be a but here, didn’t you? … the more important part of that interaction was the interaction itself, a patron interested in the nuts and bolts of what we do here and why we do it. I appreciated that and that he took an interest. This is HIS library after all.

And so the conversations continue, even if they have nothing to do with books, because whether it’s gardening or mud season or floating ducks or spread sheets, everyone and every topic is welcome here.

In fact, that’s the most important thing we do.