The Librarian and La Vida Loca

It was October, 2009.  I remember flying into Rome, the last leg of our first European adventure.  I looked out the airplane window at a land that was both familiar and foreign to me.  I'd had a night of strange, fuzzy half-sleep and was waking up in a place that was unknown to me.  It was an odd, dizzying feeling and I realized I'd better get myself together soon, because we were about to land, and I didn't know a lick of Italian.

I have had that same disorienting feeling these days, even though I'm writing this not two miles from my childhood home.  It is a strange thing when home feels like something far away.

In my most cynical moments, I hiss hateful laments at a bunch of rich white men in worsted suits who have not, as yet, brought out the best in me.  Yet, I continue looking for solutions, even though it seems I don't know the language just yet.

But I will learn it, because I sit on a secret stash, a powerful collection of bridges and bandaids, solvents and solutions.  I work in a library, after all, a place that, every single day,  lives up to its Latin roots--libre--and sets people free.  I know because I have seen it happen.

So, while my representatives in Washington--those henpecked, party-possessed, power-pleasing people who don't seem particularly interested in the poor or the passed over--play nice with a man who cares not a whit about peace or other people, I will flex every one of my secret-weapon muscles, reaching out to all of the "others" that I can find.  I will provide students tales that reflect their own lives, find them stories that connect them to folks who are not like them, and feed them books filled with ideas that expand their understanding of what it means to be a human.

I also will teach them how to sniff out poison and how to find gold.  And I will make sure they have somewhere simply to be--to hang with friends, to study for a test, to play a game of chess.

And--even if they don't live like, look like, think like or love like I do--I will be kind to every single person who walks into our library, regardless of what we have or do not have in common. I will love and celebrate them all--the acned, multi-colored, mysterious masses of almost-adults whom we so desperately need to be better than we are.

Because that is the way of the library, setting people free, one person, one story, at a time.