One wintry afternoon feeling chilled I stopped at an upper-westside cafe. I asked for a cup of tea and drinking it I overheard an attractive older woman at the next table tell the waiter someone was meeting her.
She was looking toward the door when a handsome gray-haired man entered, glanced around the room, and approached her table. She rose and there in the middle of that small cafe they embraced and kissed, and for those brief moments seemed oblivious to all around them.
Then they sat, their hands touching on the small table as they talked, and then ordered food and ate. But seemingly pressed for time, the man soon called for the bill, paid the waiter, and then rose to go. The woman stood and they embraced once more, and the man walked towards the door.
She watched him go and then put on her coat, and I saw her gently touch the back of his empty chair before she too left the restaurant.
Through the window I watched her hurry down the street and disappear into the late afternoon, upper Broadway crowd – leaving me to wonder how their star-crossed story would end.
I loved my time in libraries and still believe bringing books and good literature to kids is surely the best job in the world.
But of course there was also the less inspiring, technical side of the job – ordering, processing, and shelving books; weeding the collection; and maintaining the card catalog.
In fact I prided myself on keeping my card catalog current by adding extra subject cards to help students find books that reflected their interests as well as the school’s curriculum and my teaching colleagues’ assignments.
But by the late 1980’s the library card catalog was becoming a thing of the past and New York City’s school libraries – as all school and university and public libraries around the country – were computerizing and their catalogs going online.
We librarians were trained to use and maintain the new online catalogs knowing our old wooden card catalogs would soon be obsolete. But it was heart wrenching for me to think the custodian would soon come to haul mine away, and so to make the parting less painful I decided to keep my library’s shelf list. A shelf list is a listing – in my library’s case on cards – of every book in the collection arranged not by author, title, or subject as in the public access catalog, but rather by its Dewey Decimal or Library of Congress assigned classification number.
But of course my shelf list was accessible online as well with no need to keep those dog-eared 3 x 5 cards. And so I eventually gave up my hard copy shelf list and crossed over – a bit nervously – to the brave new world of technology.
The kids, on the other hand, had no trouble transitioning from the card to the online catalog. In fact much of her early computer know-how this old school librarian learned from her tech savvy students!
