Just how exactly did I become a librarian? It is funny the way the world categorizes and stereotypes people, but sometimes you can't fight it and the stereotypes are true. We even become proud of them. I didn't start out with a picture in my mind of Marian the Librarian knitting away in her antique rocker surrounded by a lovely collection of Dutch figurines. It started much slower than that, more of a building up of interests until suddenly one day I saw the complete vision. I may have been a little shocked by the implications of the vision, but I recognized it so intimately that I passionately embraced it. What? I am a middle-aged knitting librarian who likes to shop for antiques? That so totally rocks!
It all started with my unconventional childhood. Born in 1969, during a time when television was a popular culture craze, my recently divorced mother turned to a legalistic religion that forbid exposure to such worldly practices. My siblings and I became immediately marginalized with our cultural illiteracy, not to mention very odd style of dress. There is an entire gap in my knowledge when references are made to The Brady Bunch, David Cassidy, and any number of other favorites of the time. I never did figure out who JR was and why anyone would want to shoot him, further still, why did the whole world care? My brother was less effected by the rules of the church than my sister and I due to his being a decade older and not as obvious with the whole dress thing. In our legalistic faith, a boy could dress like a boy but a girl was required to dress like a pilgrim...not so cool in the 70's. Also, television was not the only forbidden worldly practice. There was an interminable list of no-no's which left us with very little to do other than read. Admittedly, I did not take to the actual process of reading as well as my older sister, but thanks to her, I did fall in love with books. All summer long I would follow her around begging her to "read to me". It is a family joke to speak those words with only the nagging whine a six-year old can produce. A single mom with limited resources couldn't offer much in the way of educational enrichment at the time, except for the public library. My sister would bring home all the best literature and grudgingly share it with me. She was able to make the stories come to life with her voice! I was sucked into the world of history and fantasy and teenage angst. It was beautiful and I loved it.
When she wasn't reading aloud to me we sometimes would play "pretend" (something children did a lot more of before video games and television). My favorites were school, church and library. Playing school seems standard enough, but not with my sister. She would juice things up a bit with a difficult student named Rowdy Smitten. She may have gotten that name from a book but to my young mind she was a creative genius. Church was fun to play if I got to be the piano player banging away on the lamp table that obligingly converted to a piano while my sister brought down a fire and brimstone sermon on the congregation of stuffed animals. But my favorite was library. We would take our entire stack of library books (notice no limit on check-out) and remove all the check-out cards from the back pockets, then proceed to stamp and re-card each one. Many people still mistakenly think that is all librarians do, check-out and shelve books. Little did I know then, the lifelong effect those moments were having on me, leading me to a fulfilling career in the magical world of books! Thanks, Mom, for not having a television and thanks, Sis, for reading to me!
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