I not only sent 31 peace poetry postcards out to members of my world peace project group, I received my share as well. Nestled between envelopes containing tax information, bills, and advertising, I found wonderful words of peace on postcards from across the country.
This reciprocity reminds that what is given is often what is rreceived. So when I went to a singles coffee and people didn't remember me, I realized that I had been sitting it out way too long. I needed to find a way to reconnect, a new way to contribute and interact. If I could find a way to give of myself, I would find that connection again.
I like books. I write them. I read them. I belong to a book club. So I started a monthly book exchange. And now they call me their librarian.
I always wanted to be a librarian. Libraries were always magical to me. When I was little, I loved the children's section of the library. It was full of picture books with incredible illustrations and stories that fed my love of words.
In grade school, I went through all the fairy tale books I could find on the bookmobile that came to my all portable school. When I was in high school, I found a list of recommended classic books. They were organized by year in school: freshman, sophomore, junior, senior. It was my goal to read them all. I didn't quite succeed, but I was able to check off quite a few. "The Life of Bees, Oliver Twist, The Count of Monte Cristo, Les Miserables, War and Peace, and many more" .. I was sidelined from the list a bit when I discovered books about English royalty.
I was fascinated by the wooden drawers in the library. I remember thumbing through those card files to find books for research papers, searching for them on the library shelves by their assigned numbers from the Dewey Decimal System. Now I search by titles and authors, on my computer.
For a couple years I volunteered at the downtown library, sorting donated books. It was especially fun when the carts of donations contained culled books from the library... books that had not been checked out for awhile. There were some really interesting books that I might never have read had I not had that experience, like the one about how scurvy affected world history.
My neighborhood is rich with free libraries and I often go on a walk that takes a loop past four of them. I thought it would be fun to be the librarian of one of these tiny libraries, but I don't have a lot of people walking on my tiny dead end road. Not enough to support a free library.
But now I am a librarian at last. How cool is that?
Comentários