Ye Olde Librarye - R.I.P.

I'm guessing holiday creep happens all over the country. In Houston I think everyone just gets tired of the lingering hot weather. Holiday decorations start appearing during Halloween and are in full bloom by Thanksgiving.

I'm proud to say though that the library continues to adhere to the tradition of NOT pulling out the wicker reindeer and plastic Christmas trees until after the Thanksgiving holiday. The centerpiece of our holiday cheer is situated on the roof of the plaza foyer, high above the prying hands of the public. Two reindeer - although arguably one is a sheep or goat since its horns disappeared between this year and last - stand stiff-legged next to a perfectly proportioned, eternally green tree. One of the animals slowly nods its head up and down with the help of a small motor.

Our regulars seem to be getting into the spirit as well. Max approached me today with complements on our latest book purchase. His shriveled finger held the page as he asked me to read the following paragraph:

Well, Clarissa was a a ninnyhammer. No one could dispute that. She had not read a book since before Cynthia's birth. Her conversation consisted entirely of parties, pretty gowns, and petty gossip. Once she was widowed, her head was easily turned by the attentions of whichever handsome male fleeting took her fancy.

The marquess, Augusta had to admit, had been more discreet than most. He at least, though he flirted decorously with Clarissa in public and no doubt made several assignations with her, was decent enough to do nothing that would compromise the widow's reputation in the eyes of Society.

I flipped to the cover: His Lordship's Holiday Surprise - one of our romance novel titles.

Max snickered.

"Kind of reminds you of the Night Before Christmas, doesn't it?"

"Max, you always do go in for the high society literature," I replied.

Mr. Smoothe
I only occasionally encounter Mr. Smoothe, so I was sorry to see him back. I knew I was in for a good line. The last time I saw him, he complemented my attire at length. I told him he could thank Target and moved on.

Sure enough: "How are you, beautiful?" he lobs at me, while passing by the reference desk. Mr Smoothe is a twenty-something guy with glasses and little sense. Why he wants to impress an overweight, middle-aged librarian is hard to figure.

This time, he circles back, with....an actual reference question!

"Where would I find a book on - like- if I wanted you to do something, I could say it and you'd just- like- do it?
Do you get me?" he asks.

"Um, no." I honestly don't know how to help him out, so wait for him to come up with something more coherent.

(Laughs.) "OK- like- if I wanted a WORD- like a WORD to make you do something."

"Is this getting weird?" I think to myself, but keep a poker face. Based on his other behavior I can only guess he's talking about trying to improve his moves on the ladies, but his emphasis on a single word has me thrown.

"So, like an incantation?" I reply.

"What's that?"

"Well, like magical words? A spell?" We get numerous requests for spells, curses, charms, and all sorts of occultist mishmash, so this question is not as unusual as it might seem.

(Laughs) "Naw - naw - not that."

"Well, tell me about what you want the person to do. Do you mean, do you want someone to go out on a date with you?"
I ask in all seriousness - given his interest in being smoothe.

"Naw, naw, not that. Like - if I wanted to get you to DO somethin'...like you'd say, "hey yeah, that's cool, I'll do that."
I'm beginning to get that feeling of wanting to rip my hair out, but I try a different tack.

"So maybe you want to convince someone to act. You want to motivate people?" It's a shot in the dark.

"Well, yeah, kinda like that- but not exactly."

He's really not helping. But maybe I've followed a red herring? I assumed Mr. Smoothe's question was related to his inappropriate behavior towards me. Maybe I'm being too specific. Maybe he wants to be a cult leader?

"So you want to persuade people. Let's say - convince them, to hire you?"

"Yeah! Yeah, that's it."

I tap out a search in the online catalog. "Here's one: How To Change Anybody : Proven Techniques to Reshape Anyone's
Attitude, Behavior, Feelings, or Beliefs". I scribble the call number down and gave Mr. Smoothe the paper.

"Thanks!" he said. It was the most coherent thing he'd said to date.

"It's downstairs in Humanities right below us. If you need help finding it, ask the librarians at the desk," I smiled.

I was glad I could help Mr. Smoothe. Our interaction was refreshingly normal and pushed away the past interactions that made me feel like I was trapped in a low rent singles bar. I was a librarian and he was another twenty-something kid looking for information.

Everything was right with the world.

Captured!
On Thursday, our new head of security, a middle-aged African-American man with a lazy eye and authoritative voice suited for 1950's radio, notified the evening shift that Charles Thompson, death row murderer, had escaped the Harris County Jail.

The guards were on alert, papering the library with a xeroxed "wanted" photograph of a puffy-faced redneck with dark bangs, beady eyes and a plaid shirt. I stuck the flyer to our staff room bulletin board, and wondered, "what death row inmate would head to the library after after busting out of jail?" I also noticed in passing how much the felon looked like my fellow librarian and friend, Fred.

4:30 is dinner time when you work the 12-9 shift. So when the time came, I descended to the library's underground parking garage to retrieve the granola bar that had rolled under my car seat. A grey-templed temp guard, filling in for one of the young gals with long nails, stopped me at the turnstyle.

"You heard the news, right?"

"News?" I asked, thinking the story had grown.

"A murderer's on the loose!" the guard looked positively thrilled. "I just wanted to warn you. You ARE coming back up, aren't you?"

I didn't understand this question. Did this mean he wanted to me avoid going home altogether, to spend the night in the library out of sheer terror? Was HE perhaps the murderer and was overtly threatening to kill me?

"Well, when you put it that way," I laughed. "Maybe I'm not."

I was just a little scared. But mainly because I'm creeped out by any parking garage at night.

In the end, I got my granola bar, returned to my usual company of felons, and made it home without incident.

*****

The next morning, Charles Thompson was still on the run, and his photo in our staff room had been altered with a curly vaudeville moustache and a balloon with the words," I'm hiding in the GS Collection."

As you know, the GS (or Geological Survey) Collection is the Big Thicket of the library. Home to local squirrels, and an excellent place to build a hide-out nest.

More importantly though, the image of a mustachioed escapee detracted from the fact that Charles Thompson looked markedly like Fred.

"Are you sure he's not your cousin?" I asked over our daily plate of all-you-can-eat salad. "The resemblence really is unmistakable."

Fred stuffed a piece of lettuce in his mouth.

"So you're saying I look like a puffy-faced redneck with dark bangs and beady eyes? At least I'm not wearing a plaid shirt."

It's true, he wasn't. He had tucked his blue-striped tie underneath his pale yellow dress shirt to avoid Ranch drippage.

"I said resemble, RESEMBLE. You might say that I resemble the late Princess Diana, but I don't LOOK like her." A cherry tomato rolled out of my mouth and onto the plastic brown tray.

"I'd say you neither resemble her, nor look like her."

"Whatever. I'm going to get some pudding."

*****

After lunch a xerox of the xerox of Charles Thompson, doctored with magic marker to include lipstick, mascara and ear rings, appeared on my desk. Below the photo was written, "MAMA, I DUN WRONG".

"Oh, Percy!" I sighed. "I tried to raise you right..."

Percy hung over my desk for a few days as his fraternal twin, Charles Thompson was living his remaining hours as a free man.

*****

By Monday Percy had grown paper arms and legs, a blouse, handbag and skirt. His made-up face was freed from the square frame of his mug shot and he was sitting on my chair to greet me when I arrived at work. Attached to his sensibly low heels was a note, "For Percy's sake, Vote NO on Prop #2!"

Elections were coming up the next day. Most races were shoe-ins for the incumbents. The big issue was the state-wide amendment to ban gay marriage.

Usually Fred wants to talk about the Supreme Court at lunch. But today we recapped the local news.

"Sooo, did you vote?" Fred asked, knowing full well I had.

"Yeeees. I did my part to make sure you can suffer along with the rest of us."

"What about Percy?"

"What about him? You mean, did he vote or how is the escape going?"

"Well, we know how the escape is going. He looks terrible in drag. He'll be picked up by nightfall." Fred tossed a handful of Cheese Nips and sunflower seeds into his mouth.

*****

By sunset, November 8, everyone had done their patriotic duty, but not necessarily their democratic one. Someone ratted out Charles Thompson in Louisiana, where he was picked up dead drunk in front of a liquor store. And the good ctizens of Texas protected themselves against certain male librarians and female scooter riders by voting to amend the Texas Constitution to define marriage as an exclusively heterosexual institution.

Had Charles Thompson actually become more like Percy, he might not be back on death row. Quite frankly, a man in drag hiding out in the geological survey collection wouldn't have phased any of us.

Likewise, had Texas extended basic human rights to its certain male librarians and female scooter riders, it might have looked more like a real democracy. As it stands now, it just keeps on as a puffy-faced redneck with dark bangs, beady eyes and a plaid shirt.

Squirrels
My diminutive Mexican boss came around the corner the other day with a cardboard box in her arms and a stern look on her face. She dropped the load onto the reference desk, gave a snort and stamped her foot.

"The squirrel is back!"

On closer inspection, the box was stuffed with covers of Spanish language hardbacked books without their paper guts.

"The squirrel has taken the meat from the nuts and left us with the shells!" I've gotten used to her funny folk talk.

Squirrels are part of library life. They make nests in little used areas of the library and hide things. Anything. From food, to photographs, to personal affects. And like their furry cousins, it's hard to know if you have one squirrel or 50.

Our regular squirrel has a penchant for books on Spanish missions, Dollar Store art supplies and elaborate drawings of buildings and landscapes. He stores his items in the lonesome stacks of the technical geological materials, otherwise known as the GS (Geological Survey) Collection. He hides his booty in periodical boxes, map trays or behind yellowing books, sometimes lined by plastic bags, sometimes not.

My boss caught the squirrel one day after he made a deposit to his nest. She told him he could not store things in the library. He vigorously denied that he was the squirrel and the nests have continued to reappear. In the realm of library infractions, squirreling isn't the worst. The problems is, materials disappear into squirrel nests and out of the Dewey system, lost to any other patron looking for the same title.

"La Jefecita, I don't think this is the work of the Spanish mission squirrel," I said, fingering the vandalized book covers. "Based on past behavior, our regular squirrel is not a destroyer, just a hoarder. Unless something has happened to really tip his boat, I think this one is new," I explained.

"You are RIGHT!" my boss cried, narrowing her eyes. "This is a mean squirrel. And I will find him and catch him in a trap!"

I had to empathize. Despite the large numbers of Spanish speakers in the U.S., Spanish language books can be difficult to aquire.

The main difference between human and non-human squirrels is that the human ones are much harder to trap. It's up to employee resourcefulness and imagination.

For several days my diminutive boss could be seen loitering around the Spanish language collection, but without any luck. The squirrel smelled danger and stayed away.

A Thief in Our Midst

For the second time in as many weeks a thief has struck the meager earthly belongings of the librarians in our public library.

Thanks to 1970's architecture, the staff area of our floor is open, end-to-end. What doors there are can be opened with plastic credit cards - or library cards, for that matter -- and our most secure places are our cubby hole lockers in the bathroom where a lock can be attached. Not much room though - certainly not for purse and books. As a result, we stuff our treats, plasticware, tea bags, purses, personal books, stamps, and art supplies in filing cabinet drawers. Because we're in and out of these drawers so often, we rarely lock them, since doing so requires locking the entire column.

Most of the time this system works, except when there's a thief. Which is kind of like saying, most of the time my car runs except when I'm on the highway going over 45 mph (which, incidentally, is also true).

The first time, the thief managed to ferret out the wallet, keys and cell phone of our new Library Service Specialist who had only been with us for three months. Didn't touch the 1 lb. bag of beef jerkey or Cheese Nips, She phoned him up to tell him what a fuck he is, and he answered, but quickly hung up. Arguably the biggest loss was her photo of her 35 lb. cat stuffed (by choice) into a plastic bowl. She would always show it to me when I was feeling particularly cross, and I'll miss it.

The second victim, the government documents librarian, had more stuff in her filing drawer - plastic bags, pens, pencils and the like, but the scab bee-lined to her purse and snatched her wallet. No keys or phone this time. Since it happened in the afternoon (as did the first hit) he probably didn't have much time to pick and choose. Our maintenance staff managed to find the wallet in the men's bathroom trash bin with everything in it, except the cash.

I know this will all change with the new rennovated space. The whole security concept seems non-existant in our current 1970's utopia. In addition to open-ended staff areas, copy machines are hidden away in alcoves where thieves shake them down. Books and CDs walk out the door almost as often as people when thieves figure out our easy monitoring tricks.

We're all looking forward to the rennovation that is due to start in the next six months or so. Not only for new carpeting, but so our hard earned work doesn't end up as volunteer service.

I Hate Being Wrong

Occasionally I am wrong. Occasionally. Very occasionally.

There are few things more galling than giving a patron the wrong answer. You feel like you've screwed up the universe just one more little bit.

Today a patron called and asked, "on what side is the appendix located?"

Now, what should an information professional - or anyone with sense - do, you ask? Why, refer to a trusted source! So what did I do, in all my laziness - Googled it! Sure enough, the first web site that flopped in front of me like a greasy chicken wing was a .com "health" web site. With a nice diagram. In color. With the appendix on the left side.

I told the patron my source, and gave her the info. She gave a quick hurrah, thanked me for settling a bet with her kids, and hung.

The minute I put the receiver on the hook, a gray cloud of worried fell upon me. I knew I had been lazy. I rationalized - it was a telephone call. There's a time limit. I was doing the fastest thing I knew, instead of picking up the trusted print source.

Sure enough. if I had taken 10 seconds even to look in MedLine Plus on line or a medical encyclopedia, dictionary or atlas, I would have found that the appendix is, in fact, on the right.

Oi vey...what if the woman was having stomach pain? What if she was weighing whether or not her mounting stomach ache was not appendicitis? I know, I know, we're not doctors. We don't give out legal or medical advice and we're not liable for care.

But I was WRONG. The kids were RIGHT. And the universe is just that much more out of whack.