Thursday

Library day! Ah, but the thought of libraries is upsetting to me right now, because they are talking about closing the library except for one day a week. What would the librarians do then? They wouldn't be able to survive working only one day a week. I don't want to think about it!

We missed story hour because we didn't even finish our walk until 10am, when story hour starts. No misuse of the path, no quail in sight, a pretty dull walk. We got to the library at 11am, just when story hour was ending. The boos were very bad at the library today, would not look at books. Baby B kept trying to run behind the librarians' desk. There is a sign on the front door of the library (a new sign) that says something about All Children Must Be Controlled by an Adult (that can't be it, exactly, but it's the general idea). My children were not amenable to control today. I think the problem was that a large woman and her children were sitting at the little table right next to the board books, and so the boos couldn't get to most of the books. Baby B kept touching the woman's wide back, but she never turned around. Finally I put them back in the stroller, grabbed a few books, and we left.

The librarians are so nice, though. As we stood in line to check out, one tried to get me to sign my children up for some summer reading program. She said, "For younger children, it's OK if the parent reads the book to them." I said I thought they were still just a little too young, since they often don't pay attention to me reading the books, so how would I know whether to count a book as "read" or not? Baby B was sucking on one of the books we were getting, and another librarian said "so that's why those books wear out so quickly!" I apologized and she said no, no, that's what they're there for, etc. I wanted to ask the librarians about the threat of the one-day a week library but couldn't bring myself to do it.

For me, grabbing randomly, I checked out a cookbook and a biography of Harper Lee. The babies got 2 board books and one regular-page book. Right now I am reading "Family Romance" by John Lanchester, which I read a brief review of in the New Yorker. It's a memoir and very interesting. The Ridgecrest library didn't have it, I had to request it. I think it came from a library in Bakersfield.

When I was in college, at Berkeley, I remember there was a guy who lived in my co-op who was from Bakersfield. He was a chemistry major and had a lot of issues. I remember thinking (based on his description) that Bakersfield must be this terrible, end-of-the-universe kind of place. It is odd that Bakersfield is now, for me, the place with the best libraries (in Kern County), and I live at the end of the universe, in Ridgecrest.