I Was a Fake Librarian

My dear old Cleveland is still the butt of so many jokes! Outsiders will say Oh yes, you have a great orchestra and a world-class art museum, then still go on to make the same tired jokes about our sports teams, our burning river etc. People! Wake up! Cleveland is a vital, diverse, growing city, PLUS it’s a blue bubble in Ohio’s sickly sea of red.

And that’s without mentioning our library, AKA The People’s University, with its collection of close to eleven million items and its status as the beating heart of a forty-four library consortium. Numbers never mean much to me but this does: never ever have I requested a book, no matter how obscure, that CPL didn’t deliver to me.

Which makes me very happy that next week, I’ll be lucky enough to take part in this:

https://musicboxcle.com/event/the-power-of-words-may21/

Most of you reading this will, sadly, probably not be able to teleport and join us. So here is the piece I’ll read that night, a tiny ode to the librarians I once worked with in the children’s room of the Shaker Heights Public Library.

Why do cats purr; what time is the next #41 bus; where are the books with magic spells that actually work? What’s a fractal; how do you spell Cartoon Network; what time is it in China; where’s that book, you know, the red one with a dog on the cover?

I worked for more than a decade in the children’s room of the Shaker Heights Public Library. I was a fake librarian—no MLS—but kids trusted me as much as they did the real librarians. Which is to say, totally. That belief still humbles me. Stepping up to our desk, they’d fire away, one question after another, confident they’d get what they needed. For a librarian, nothing beats nurturing a child’s curiosity. Whenever I made a little patron’s face light up, I was Einstein. I was a rock star. Now and then, I was part of a vaudeville routine.

Child: Do you know where my father is?

Librarian: No, but your mother’s right over there.

Child: She doesn’t know where he is either.

The status of know-it-all is one of the few aspects of being a librarian that’s stayed the same over the years. The stereotypes have all been busted. Our only librarian with a bun was the young guy over in movies and music. The shushing finger to the lips? Don’t make us laugh.

Can’t you make that boy quit pestering me; you got poster board and markers for my science project; where are the books about, you know, somebody died; my stepfather got mad and kicked me out of the house without my coat and now what should I do?

The world has always come through the doors of the public library, but these days, it doesn’t lower its voice.

For many children, the library has become a place to feel safe. To get warm, to cool off. To score a bag lunch. To wait till parents get off work, to hide from parents who are out of work. To play computer games or chess or maybe curl up for a much-needed nap. As things get tougher all around, libraries become more and more like the mitten in the beloved children’s book by Jan Brett. That little mitten, dropped in the snow, keeps magically stretching, tugged impossibly bigger as it gives shelter to any creature who needs it.

Not to say this is easy. Far from it. These days, some of the hardest questions are the ones librarians ask themselves, as they wonder how to do more with less. How can they best serve their communities when needs are so varied and so immense? When the responsibility to uphold the freedom to read is greater than ever?

And yet—trust me! Librarians still adore questions! There’s nothing that bugs them more than an unanswered one, no matter how big or small. When I sat at the library desk, when kids came tumbling through our doors, my colleagues and I had one message for them. Ask us. Tell us what you need. Let us help. We’re here to learn, too.