Love of the Library

As you can probably tell by the title I’m going to write yet another “I love” post. Yes, I do write a lot of those, don’t I? But it’s so much fun writing about things you love and enjoy. It’s so lovely looking at the world and bits of your life and picking out things you love especially well as your topic for a post or two. It’s like counting your blessings and then writing about them, which I love. So many times we overlook our little blessings, the little happiness’ that make life such a beautiful thing, and writing blog posts on them helps you focus in on them I think. It helps you appreciate them and realize how blessed we really are. If you’re looking around at daily happenings in your life as possible blog post topics you are suddenly aware of how much you love these things that you are writing about. I write numberless blog posts in my head. Much more than I actually sit down and write. I’ll look at something and in my head start writing the beginning of a blog post about that thing, and they are lovely posts, but you see I always forget to actually write out those blog posts so they go bouncing and spinning away from me across the horizon. I am much too distractible you know. For when I sit down at my laptop, as I am now, I forget all about those lovely already-written-in-my-head blog posts and my fingers go pattering along on some other previously unthought-of strain of thought.

Now, I will be wandering altogether too far away from the point of discussion if I continue much longer on this stain, much as I would like to. One of my “in my head blog posts” was a blog post I often think of when I’m working. I work at the library, did you know that? Well, as I go around with my cart of books, lovingly putting the dear things in their proper places on the shelves I often think of a blog post just on how much I love the library. This blog post has many beginnings, many different turns and twists as I rethink it in my different moods in the different days. Most often it begins just as I’m beginning work for the afternoon and I’m feeling quite chipper and so happy with my little duties. I love starting work in the afternoon, I love putting those books down on my cart and alphabetizing them and that warm happy feeling of perfect happiness for no real reason at all. Just being happy.

A lot of people don’t like working in the children’s room, that’s because out of all the library (of course) it gets the most disorderly and messy. All of the children coming in and pulling out picture books and shoving them back in with grubby little paws. I used to not like that room quite as well because of that, but recently I’ve been falling more and more in love with the children’s room. Maybe it’s because all of my old friends are in there. All of those books I remember pulling out and sitting on the floor browsing through. I love watching the kids come in and browse around in the books. You can always tell the ones who love the books. There are a few who irritate me, these children always go instantly to the computers, yes, these ones are the trouble makers, but the book lovers, oh I love those little dears! The go quietly through the shelves with small fingers touching each spine. They get out great stacks, books of all different sorts and shapes, picture books, fiction, nonfiction, comics, but always great stacks of them and they sit down at the tables and rifle through them. Yes, they leave rather a mess for me to tidy up but it makes me happy to put away the books that they were looking through and reading at those tables.

I love looking up from my cart of book and hearing the little girl in the corner break out into a happy giggle at some funny part in her book. I love listening to the Mother sitting on the couch reading a picture book to her little boy cuddled into her side. I love the little boy who comes and tugs on my sleeve and asks “where are the books on dragons?” I love the sisters browsing through the books, the older poking the younger and saying “get this one! This one’s good!” and I love that I get to set out my favorites on display. I get to pick out the books that I remember loving and setting them up so that they gleam alluringly from the top of the shelves, saying “read me! Read me!”

I love people who read.

Read for real, you know. Not the people who say they read, but the people who are so busy with their nose in a book to even speak up and say they love to read. I love the rustling of many pages of the books as you pass the chairs set up in comfy hidden nooks of the library. I get rather excited when I see a person with a book I love in their hand. I was to cry out “THE EMERALD CITY OF OZ! YES! YES! READ!” and start bouncing up and down as I hug that beloved book. Or say “*gentle cough* I would go to the Jane Austen section if I were you. Oh and ignore that random zombie one that’s stuffed in there. *voice drops to a whisper* that one’s a phony. Trust me. It’s not hers. You’ll see the difference.” The impulse to kneel down by the young reader in the learn to read books and say “I always loved Amelia Bedelia. She’s over here,” grows almost irresistible.

I love the quiet atmosphere of the library as I work. Now I don’t even have to think about alphabetizing the books, it just comes naturally. I can get lost in my thoughts and look down and find out that all those picture books are sorted neatly from A to Z. I also just like the feel of the books themselves, because I love books. Someone was saying the other day how they didn’t really like touching the books, but I rather like thinking of all the different hands turning the pages to those books you know. Not that because of that I don’t wash my hand regularly while handling those books, I do, but the thought of the hands holding the books rather makes me happy than disturbs me like it does some.

I think my very favorite thing to do though is pulling off the hold requests from the shelves. Especially the ones that are being sent inter-library-loan to another library somewhere. I love thinking that the book I’m holding in my hands will soon be traveling across country, on a long journey with a little yellow slip saying it’s from my library, and that pretty soon some person will be coming to take that book home with them. I love imagining what sort of person is going to be getting that book. Imagining their appearance to go along with their personality, as I get rather a glimpse of that from the books they are requesting. The sort of book a person gets says a lot about them *nods* you get just a hint of what they are like and a glimpse of their personality. Yes, I love thinking about all these things as I hold the picture book with golden leaves covering the cover. Where will that book end up before it travels back to me? I wonder.

That’s all for now. I do believe I have said “I love” rather more even than I expected to when I began this post, but it’s true. I do love all of those things, and I’m quite happy thinking about all of them now.

My Baby Sister Meets Pooh Bear

Ella meet Winnie the Pooh

Winnie the Pooh meet Ella

May your friendship be long and lovely.



On a Certain Loveable Bear

I have a confession. Not so very long ago, I was babysitting for some friends one evening. It was bedtime for the kids, and after they had fallen asleep and were dreaming sweet dreams in their beds I wandered downstairs and found myself at a loss for something to do. The house was picked up, the kitchen clean, children asleep; I was free to spend my quiet time however I chose! Lovely thought indeed! Do you know how I chose to spend it? I curled up on the couch with the fire crackling, a cup of tea at my elbow and a book in my hands. A book on a certain loveable bear. That’s right, Winnie the Pooh.

I love Winnie the Pooh. In the first he brings back such sweet memories of childhood. When I think of Winnie the Pooh, I think of the quilt set that used to cover my bed. The quilt set with the Hundred Acer Woods covering it and pictures of Christopher Robin holding a balloon by the big oak tree and Owl sitting atop Eeyore’s back. I think of the soft stuffed animals in a basket upstairs in our playroom. Stuffed animals I don’t remember getting it was so long ago. You see I don’t remember when I first began to love Pooh Bear, he was always there. As far back as I can remember he was always my favorite. I have a vague idea of a memory of sitting down on the carpeted floor watching the old Disney cartoon as a tot of three, but I can’t decide whether this is a memory that I have created from stories my Mom has told me, or if it is a real memory of my own. Memories are funny like that, sometimes you think you remember something but you are remembering a picture of that something.

The old Disney cartoon is wonderful, I love the sketchy animation, and the adorable songs and Pooh with his rumbly in his tumbly. I can still watch and enjoy that movie with all the love that I used to have for Winnie the Pooh but I think to properly enjoy it I have to be watching it with one of my younger siblings in my lap or by my side. Sadly I can’t enjoy it the way I used to if I’m watching it alone anymore. I have to have my baby sister in my lap and be watching her face as I hum all the old songs.

The book however, isn’t like that. I can still pick up that book all by myself and enjoy it even more than I used to even, because I can appreciate now A. A. Milne’s writing in a way I couldn’t as a child. It is the same old well-loved stories, but now I am listening to his amazing style as I read. The thing about these old classic “children’s books” is how incredibly they are written. A. A. Milne chose, like E. B. White, to write tales for children, but they wrote them in such a way they are every bit as artistically written as any adult classic. The words they chose were carefully and selectively chosen, they were writing stories that appealed to children yet in a way they could appeal to anyone.

When I read Winnie the Pooh now I am amazed at the hidden wit, the cleverness that went into his stories. I am suddenly laughing away at something that Rabbit has said quite unconsciously of course, but A. A. Milne was conscious of it. He had planned it out to have just that affect on his reader. He was carefully choosing each word to mean something in the long run. Creating it into so much more than “just” a child’s story. It is a story for all ages. That’s what makes him such an amazing author. He is not writing a child’s story because it is the “easy way out” (they will never know the difference will they?) his “child’s story” is every bit as complex and detailed as any learned one for an adult. It is just that he is choosing to write it about childhood and innocence and those playmates of imagination one had of old.

What is so inspiring I think is the idea that whatever you write, be it fiction, nonfiction, a child’s book or even a baby’s board book should be written with the same effort and care. Whether the story itself be simple or complex the same amount of effort and love should be placed into the writing of that story and the words chosen.

Just think of all the inspiring children’s books and their authors, it is worth contemplating. So much inspiration to be gained from something so outwardly simple.

Back to Winnie the Pooh.

Besides the childhood memories, and the lovely style of these books, who can help loving the illustrations? They. Are. Adorable. Each word deserves a period for emphases. The animation of the Disney cartoons are awfully sweet but ten time sweeter are the dear little illustrations by Ernest Sheppard. I had such fun looking up pictures to go with this post and I had an awfully hard time selecting just a couple of drawings to go along with. I love them all.

Go dig out your copy of Winnie the Pooh if you haven’t in a few years and revel in my little childhood friend, because I love him.

*says in a loving voice* Dear Silly Old Bear.