a sweet, sweet duty, indeed.

photo by philip borges

"so what is it that you do?" you know that question that follows those moments of pregnant silence — making small talk at parties, sitting next to strangers on the plane, meeting your other's parents for the first time — how can you really quantify what comprises your day? it is not enough really to say, "i work for the library." people get the wrong idea about shushing, and tend to wrongly envision the whole 'librarian' thing. to explain sometimes that i am — not — a librarian is a confusing, moot point for some…rather, i like to say that what i do is something like social work…but for the library. how much easier it is to explain that i spend my days bringing and sending books to the people who need them most: the people who can't get to the library…the people who otherwise have virtually no contact with the outside world…and spend their days with the television for company…living such an interior world in their heads, that i can tell when they call me…and our conversations will take at times 12 minutes…in spite my very best seasoned efforts at prompting a direction towards some resolution i can foster...because they don't even know what books are out there to be read…and they are so used to silence…and all they know is they want to escape into some idea of a world that is not their lonely own. i do everything…from talking down the sometimes irate, often intelligible who can't understand why they don't have the book they ordered yesterday…when it takes time sometimes to order it…wait for the courier…process it…bag it and run it through the postage machine…send it out with the postman…and wait for that indecipherable mystery to deliver it to their door — to — the ordering and processing and shelving and pulling of books and the unbagging of mail and rebagging of mail and the writing and mass-mailing of newsletters and the loading up of crates and the planning of routes and the driving to deliver huge collections of books for people at nursing homes and jails and treatment centers and veteran's hospitals and rehab facilities and alternative schools and everywhere else people require a slice of free thought with which to broaden the otherwise limited horizon of their minds.

and days when, every patron may call yelling…and not just because, on the other end of the line, even i can hear the feedback on their hearing aides, i remind myself that i do what i do by reading this:


Alphabet

One by one
the old people
of our neighborhood
are going up
into the air

their yards
still wear
small white narcissus
sweetening winter

their stones
glisten
under the sun
but one by one
we are losing
their housecoats
their formal phrasings
their cupcakes

When I string their names
on the long cord
when I think how
there is almost no one left
who remembers
what stood in that
brushy spot
ninety years ago

when I pass their yards
and the bare peach tree
bends a little

when I see their rusted chairs
sitting in the same spots

what will be forgotten
falls over me
like the sky
over our whole neighborhood

or the time my plane
circled high above our street
the roof of our house
dotting the tiniest
"i"


- naomi shihab nye