She is a patron of the MLK Branch

The library is an asset in our communities. Like EOYDC it keeps our children off the streets and their minds from being idle. Its another safe haven for our children. It has also provided many hands on programs to our children where they can engage both mind and hands. The library has been a blessing to my family and it keeps them from wasting numerous hours on the T.V., playstation or games on their cell phones.

~Chinise Mason

Re: What was your Bookmobile like?

Yea libraries! You are doing important work. Thank you, Patrick. My bookmobile was
like a bread truck but with books inside. It came Pond, to the small agricultural town in the central valley of California where we lived. I was quite small; my mother got novels to read. I remember the stairs and how nice and snug it was inside -- nice for a child.

Best wishes on your worthy projects,

Kay Ryan

http://www.loc.gov/poetry/laureate_current.html

A Public Trust

I went to Berkeley High, which was in the 1940's already a school of over 3000. In the Bobby sox Regiments of the time, where peer group pressure demanded a crushing conformity of dress, speech, and behavior, being an intellectual, especially an intellectual girl, was a hard, humiliating task. You lived in disguise. You hid your brain in the closet. You tried your damndest to put your heart into squealing for Frankie Sinatra. You bought skirts and sweaters just like the BWOC wore. But you never fooled anybody. It was like going to Finland and pretending to be Finnish without being able to speak Finnish. It was hopeless. It was six hours a day of social failure and internal exile for three years. The one thing that redeemed it for me was the Berkeley Public Library, right around the corner.

I went there as soon as school was out and stayed an hour or two or three, roaming the stacks. I was home. Home free. Free at last, Lord, free at last! I say that in all seriousness. That library was my liberty. There I restored and regained all the soul I compromised or lost at school. The librarians soon knew me, knew my type, and never bothered me. I investigated all the departments and all the floors. When I found French literature up on the dark third floor where nobody else ever came, I more or less moved in there. There was a window with an inner ledge where I could sit and read -- plowing very slowly with my third-year French through Cyrano de Bergerac and weeping aloud at the end, or lost to the world in Tess of the d’Urbervilles, or wallowing with earnest adolescent ecstasy in the poems of Ernest Dowson. The librarians in those days couldn't let people with a high school library card check out sexy bestsellers such as Forever Amber, but if there was a copy on the New Books shelf, they never knew if you took it up to the third floor, palpitated or yawned through it for hours, and then put it back.

Or maybe they did know?

Whatever they knew or didn't, I bless their memory, and that of the beautiful building full of books, and my third-floor window-niche. And, though American society of the 1940's was in many ways anti-intellectual, benighted, and rigidly oppressive, yet let me say this for it: The Public Libraries then were a public trust, a community responsibility. They were open every afternoon, six days a week, every week of the year, offering everybody liberty, learning, and the chance to make your soul.

With all good wishes,

Ursula K. Le Guin
Portland, Oregon
http://www.ursulakleguin.com/UKL_info.html

Photo Copyright © by Marian Wood Kolisch

I COULD LIVE IN THE LIBRARY

make my bed on the floor
behind the stacks in Business & Technical,
wash in the women’s restrooms,
eat meals smuggled in knapsacks
by friendly students,
listen to Vivaldi on the ground floor
at the bank of turntables with headphones,
lounge in Periodicals
with the daily paper and a bootleg TV
after closing time,
race up and down the stairwells
to raise my pulse,
collect my mail at the Circulation Desk:

Everyone is fine. The washer broke.

What should I use for diaper rash?
When are you coming home?

Good luck to you and your friend. Libraries are one of my loves and vital to all of us.

Linda

Linda RodriguezHeart's Migration (Tia Chucha Press)
The "I Don't Know How to Cook" Book: Mexican (Adams Media)
http://www.lindarodriguezwrites.blogspot.com/

Everyday Hungers

For the temporary branch of the Multnomah County Central Library,1995-1997, a former state unemployment office.

The temporary library in winter
had the closeness of a submarine.

Grade school children, hungry writers,
office workers, artists, dozers--
we crowded through the doors as if embarking
on a peaceful trip under the river
while a great storm raged up above.

It was all of a piece: the smell of
winter clothes, the ceilings that once
umbrallaed the unemployed, the hiss of
fluorescent rain, and the baskets of
children’s books, flaps glued,
pages dotted with erasered light.

The halls of our vessel began to smell
like the halls of a public school at lunchtime.
After a while we stopped missing the
main library building’s marble stairs.

Because the mind has its everyday hungers,
and the soul needs nourishment, too,
we followed the comforting odors
issuing from the kitchen,
drew our seats up to the tables,
and opened the delicious books.

~Barbara LaMorticella

Dot Floored Me

On Tuesday, June 30 I attended my second Oakland City Council meeting concerning budgetary cutbacks to the library system in Oakland. Again I held up Patrick’s sign, “Save The Libraries,” and again with my usual ambivalence about public speaking: it’s scary/it’s important/stretch the parameters of comfort (work those muscles and make them stronger), I marched up to the podium.
Earlier in the day I had sat comfortably enough in the office of my Dentist Dr. Thuy Bui of Alameda, whom I trust and recommend, whole-heartedly. As I had my teeth cleaned, I concocted this little story, a composite of sorts…
The other day as I returned from my morning bicycle ride around the lake, I came across my elderly neighbor, Dot, doing a bit of gardening, having earlier hobbled home from her morning walk to the Lakeside Library. Amazingly, dot who is eighty-seven years old makes this daily pilgrimage, she worships at the alter of books and learning, this plus the walk is what has kept her so young and spry, both physically and intellectually. She greeted me with an unusually crabby (for her), “Can you believe the City of Oakland allows these climate change deniers to run noisy gasoline-powered leaf-blowers and water-blasters as a matter of course, any time for any excuse? Don’t they know there is a draught happening? Global warming? What about my asthma and that of the kids in the neighborhood, don’t they know that all those leaf-blowers do is raise all the dust? Do they care if the water-blasters make me deaf or crazy, or if they give me a heart attack? No, I guess they don’t care about me, but for them to recklessly allow all those greenhouse gasses to destroy our planet for no reason is unforgivable!”
I tried in my usual calming tones of acknowledgement to assure Dot that she was heard, but I had to ask her, in some puzzlement, “I follow you, I agree with you, Dot, but why did you call those who use the leaf-blowers and the water-blasters ‘climate change deniers?’ She amazed me by telling me that when she goes to the library she not only reads the likes of Bill Mckibbon, Paul Erlich, and Jeff Rubin to name a few, but she takes their messages to heart. She told me she fails to understand how anyone using those aforementioned gasoline-powered implements could possibly not be in total darkness, therefore denial of the peril to our entire civilization and all species, our earth, waters and atmosphere, if they were willing to use them.
Then Dot floored me by telling me that even though she has no computer, she regularly visits the websites of various environmental groups at the library’s free computers, to sign their petitions, email her representatives, so that she can feel she is contributing her part to the solution to climate change.
I am in continuous and growing awe of Dot, and I feel more than ever because of her, inspired to fight to save our libraries.

I think I bombed this time in my speech to Oakland City Council because the one minute or so that they gave me just wasn’t long enough. It is up to me to find a way to create the pithiest little sound-bite koans in the future. I believe I shall for the moment persevere.

~Chandra Garsson

www.darksecretlove.com/chandra

www.vspcity.com/insomnia