Saturday, February 13, 2016

The Libraryless Librarian

I pushed my little cart down the hall very slowly.
With fifty books in precarious stacks I felt
like the little old lady on the Hogwarts Express.
"Anything from the cart?" I said to myself in
my old lady fake British accent.
Only instead of chocolate frogs I had new books.
I had panicked in September when I had not
been hired anywhere for a librarian job.
I had resigned from  Elizabeth Blackwell elementary
because of the traffic. How smug I had been.
How certain that with two year's experience I
would get snapped up in a jiffy.
Right when I was ready to spiral into jobless depression
I saw a librarian job posted in Shoreline school district.
When I went to the interview, the director, Chrisy, said
"This is a bit of an unusual job because
we have no library. You'll teach the lessons
in the rooms and walk the kids to the Meridian Park
library in the other side of the building for check out."
Hmmm. That sounded fine except there were no books
for the middle school students IN that library.
Cascade K-8 had started as a tiny one hundred student
alternative school without a library forty years ago.
Now all they had was broom closet with
a few hundred old paperbacks,
mostly donated by one of the teachers.
I nearly cried for my students the first time I saw it.
So, I did what any librarian worth her salt
would do and had a book fair to raise funds
for middle school books.
Now the proceeds, fifty new middle school books,
shifted slightly as I rolled over the bump and
into the seventh and eighth grade classroom.
I smiled at the students and said,
"Anything from the cart?"

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