MUSIC

I was giving my stove a good cleaning this afternoon and while I was cleaning I was listening to the Adult Alternative music channel on TV. My son was good enough to connect my tv to my stereo speakers while he was home at Christmas. The sound is so much better.

Anyway, I was thinking how lucky I am to be 63 years old and have such a rich history of music. Oh, I know, most young people today have heard all the music from the 50’s, 60’s and on, but they have no personal history of that music as I have. They can’t hear Elvis sing “Don’t Be Cruel” and remember the night they first heard it and what they were doing. I, on the other hand, can remember it well. I was at a party and had a fight with my boyfriend, and that song made a lot of sense to me. Every time I hear a song from one of those eras I remember some of my personal history. I can even remember being very young and listening to my mother’s music, jazz and swing and opera. My father liked country, blues, Tennessee Earnie Ford, Harry Belafonte, and the Kingston Trio.

We were a dancing family. I hope my two kids enjoy dancing as much as I did (do). I danced a lot at home, though it seemed to embarrass my daughter. It is good exercise and sometimes I still stop what I’m doing when I hear a good Rolling Stones song and dance a little bit. I can still dance swing, waltz, two step and do the twist.

I know both my kids love music. I learn a lot of the new things out there from them. My son mixes and DJ’s as a hobby. I like the drum and bass. Some of the other stuff is too repetitive for me, but I can listen and enjoy it for short periods of time. My daughter has sent me CDs that she thought I might enjoy and I think she has good taste.

So, if you don’t have music in your life now, do something about it! It is so important. Play music for your babies and continue to have music in your home for them until they leave and make their own homes. Let them experiment with it and make their own musical history. Try not to judge what they might listen to. Let them figure out what they like and dislike without your judgment. If you don’t like it, ask them to put on earphones or keep the music in their room. Let them make their own choices. You brought them up. Trust that they will make good decisions.

Now, back to the kitchen!

Memoirs of a Librarian

Memoirs of a Librarian
Chapter One

THE SIXITIES

I began my library career as a student in 1961 at Texas Woman’s University in Denton, Texas. I doubt that the library science faculty had any idea how their world was going to change! We were not the students who normally came through this school. After all, it was the beginning of the sixties. We argued, questioned and did things that were outrageous.

Every year before Christmas, the freshman class was to put on the program for the staff, faculty and students of the school of library science. In the past there had been book reviews, book talks, etc. We were different. We took the poem “The Night Before Christmas and transferred it to a beatnik poem about books and libraries. I wish I had kept a copy…it was hilarious! I wore a long white turtleneck sweater and black tights and read the poem while brandishing a cigarette in a long cigarette holder. We talked about books like Chaucer, Tropic of Capricorn, Lady Chatterly’s lover and so forth and ended up throwing paperback copies of the books into the audience.. I think we were the only ones having a good time….every one else was in a state of disbelief.

Things continued in that vein until we graduated and went our separate ways out into the big world of public libraries and school libraries. I accepted a position with the Houston Public Library as a children’s librarian in 1965. For a while I worked in the main library in downtown Houston. While I was there the female staff got very excited by an advertisement that came out in Playboy magazine. It was a Tipparillo ad. I need to see if I can find a copy online and add it to this. There was a beautiful woman sitting holding a book…she obviously had no clothes on and the book was strategically placed to cover her…she was looking up over the book. The ad said, “Should you offer a Tipparillo to a librarian? Then in parenthesis it said, “yes, but offer to light it for her, she’ll have to put down that book!”

We purchased many copies of the magazine and posted that ad in every lounge for staff members to see! Thank God! We might be getting free of that awful image of the little old lady with her hair in a bun and a pencil behind her ear!


Then there were those of us that wore mini-skirts. Some patron always seemed to be calling and complaining to the powers that be about those mini-skirts in the libraries! Heaven forbid!

Oh yes…that first job paid a whopping $4000.00 a year! You must remember though, a brand new VW Beetle cost around $1300.00 in those days! I soon got a raise and a promotion to assistant librarian at one of the nicer branches. One of my jobs was to keep track of the overdue books. Once a month a Houston Police Officer would report to my branch to escort me to various addresses where we demand our library materials be returned. Didn’t Stephen King write a story called “The Library Police”? Some of the places we went to were cordoned off with police crime tape and we were informed that everything in the house or apartment was being kept for evidence and we couldn’t get our books back. The library was in an affluent section of Houston and so some of these people had expensive art books out worth hundreds of dollars.

Well, by 1967 I was the Branch Head Librarian for one of the newer branch libraries in Houston. The hours were long and the headaches many. One Saturday morning a patron came in and announced that there was a motorcycle gang parked on the lawn of the library and people were afraid to go past them to enter the library. I called the supervisor of branch libraries and found there was nothing I could do about it…it was public property and if they were not terrorizing people or trashing the place they had the right to be there.

I got married that year and resigned from the public library. The next day I started my career as a school librarian in a Houston Jr. High School. I was there for one year. My husband and I saved all our money that year and then took off to hitchhike all over Europe. But that is a story for another time. We did not return home until 1970. Stay tuned for Chapter 2 The Seventies.

Nature

I just returned from my vacation on Padre Island. I took my digital camera and to my amazement I took more pictures of sea birds than I did of people. That got me to thinking.

When I was a young child I was fascinated by nature. By the time I became a teenager I stopped looking and became involved more with the social side of life. When I was in my 30’s and had small children of my own, I became more interested because I had these wonderful children who were amazed and delighted with bugs, ants, spiders, frogs, etc. I would go to the library and check out books on whatever bug or reptile my children were interested in and we would learn all about them. Then my children became teenagers and lost interest and so did I.

I stopped paying attention to the nature around me until I was in my late fifties. I wonder if that is because I was so busy with other parts of my life…job, children, family. Now I am finding that I am a complete dunce about the nature surrounding my life. I am finding now that I want to know what kind of birds are around me, what kind of trees are in my yard, what happened to all the butterflies, where have all the fireflies gone?

As a young child I watched spiders building webs, screamed when I saw tarantulas, snakes, lizards and horned toads. Somewhere along the line I forgot about all that. Now, here I am at 63 years old and a lot of those creatures that I found so fascinating as I child have just disappeared. I have begun to look for them and cannot find them. I live in the desert of New Mexico. I used to see horned toads daily. Now, I have not seen one in several years. I used to see brightly colored butterflies and now I see a few small yellow ones and small white ones, but that is about all.

When I was about 8 years old my family moved to south Texas and I spent a lot of time at the beach on South Padre Island. I remember the sea gulls as being whitish gray and swooping along the beach, begging people to throw bread at them. This last trip there was a new gull, at least new to me. The other gulls were there but the new ones appeared to outnumber them by about 15 to 1. So now I have a quest. I need to find out where and when these new gulls began appearing and more importantly, why?