When I was 21, I worked as Bob Klineman's secretary at Bates Bedspreads in Manhattan. It was one of those in-between jobs while I tried to figger out what to do with the rest of my life. I would hand Bob one of my carefully typed letters for him to sign & he'd return it with his dirty fingerprints from pipe-smoking. He had a little office in the back and you could hear him talking on the phone to his new wife & blowing her kisses.
The days went by fast. Bob kept me busy. I waited for the erudite office mail server twice a day. We didn't have much time to chat but we'd exchange names of good books. He talked me into reading The Fixer by Bernard Malamud and from then on I was hooked on that author whom I read while taking the bus and train from Englewood Cliffs, NJ, into Manhattan.
One day it dawned on me. Become a librarian! I'd had 3 semesters at Goddard College, had no ambition, and was looking for a career. I had no idea what librarians do, but to work in an environment filled with books and encyclopedias and dictionaries and atlases was a far far better thing than sitting in a windowless office typing letters to Bonwit Teller, The Higbee Company, and Carson Pirie Scott.
I decided to become a librarian.
First, tho, lemme tell you how I spent my lunch hours in Manhattan. I had a strict schedule. I would walk from The Garment District uptown to Times Square and have the most marvelous of all possible lunches: A hot dog with sauerkraut and mustard and a Regular Drink from Orange Julius. Nothing was better.
Sometimes I'd stop at Penn Station where passenger trains from all over the entire country would stop. Dressed nicely, wearing my hip Fred Braun shoes which I needed to pad inside with cardboard since the sole developed a hole in it, I was often taken for an official at Penn Station. Thing is, there were no officials. But elderly travelers thought I was there as a guide to help them find bathrooms, staircases, ticket booths.
Not having anything better to do on my lunch hour and eager to forget my association w/Bates Bedspreads, I did what I could to help, often fantasizing wearing an official badge of my own making.
After I was married and living in Texas, I did pursue a library degree at the U of TX at Austin. I had never loved classes so much except perhaps English at Temple where we studied Dante's Inferno and Paradise Lost and of course The Holy Bible. Having access to much of the world's knowledge thru library science was a heady experience for a naive girl from Shaker Heights, Ohio.
Since the birth of my daughter Sarah was imminent I only completed one semester of library science. I then became that greatest of all things: A Mother. Full-time. For both Sarah and Dan.
My love of libraries is as strong as ever. My home library is The Upper Moreland where I visited only yesterday.
Guess what? My blogging time is up. Gotta get on with my day. I'll talk to you later.
