The Three Fates

B"H

A Real Job?

My first real jobs were dreadful or perhaps I was dreadful.  Don't really know or remember but I do recall that the library job made me nuts.  I had three supervisors:  the oldest was a retired military librarian; the middle-aged one was a spinster with the warmest heart who tried to help me with her smile; and the young University of Chicago Library School graduate who had no self esteem whatsoever, though we didn't talk about such things then, cried on my shoulder.  By the time I finished listening to all of their instructions and assignments I had nothing to do and no way to do it.  They stuck me in a little room in the bowels of the library.  I did sit at this magnificent old wooden desk well used, I could tell.  The new typewriter stared at me.  And I stared at it as I typed cards for the author, title, and subject card catalogue.  The cards apparently had to be perfect.  One mistake and I was instructed by the general to start all over on a fresh new card.  I was not allowed to correct a single mistake.  This puzzled me.  As a student I was using this card catalogue system.  The very oldest cards in the catalogue were handwritten in Old Librarian Hand, a very clean and clear script.  Some of those cards had corrections in the form of crossing out and continuing.  I suppose that in those olden days no one could afford to buy as many boxes of cards as surrounded me day-in and day-out.  What a task I had for the times when there was nothing else to do. 

My bosses were somehow impressed by the fact that I wore a knee length skirt with a white blouse, knee socks and loafers.  They did not know that all of my friends dressed the same way.  How could they know that?  My friends were getting married and not going to university let alone college.  The kids on campus were either preppy Greek or sloppy revolutionaries.  A few were simply clean and neat but they did not mingle.  They were too busy on work study programs to pay attention to the bizarre social life on campus. 

In retrospect, i.e. looking back thirty-five, thirty-six plus years, I was a lousy employee in spite of my very pleasing conservative dress.  To say that they were lousy bosses does not absolve me from any of my sins.  I was clueless and no one took me under a sheltering wing to train and guide me on the proper path.   Though, ... there was one old librarian who holed up in the same storage stacks (book stacks) where I was abandoned and stranded.  I would come out of my "closet" in tears of frustration, surrounded by the scariest looking gargoyles a wood worker decided to carve eons ago.  He would call me over to his little desk to hand me an envelope for my bosses which I would deliver to the main reading room.  After the missive was read by all three ladies I was told to return to the old librarian immediately for a very urgent project.  So, I returned to the old man in the dusty stacks where he always chewing on an empty pipe ... never smoke in the stacks ... ever.  Honestly, it never even crossed my mind.  I didn't even own a pipe.

"I've saved you from the Three Fates," he would declare, "just for a few hours".  Then he would make a pot of tea for us and read to me from the handwritten journals he was cataloging.  These were pages first composed three hundred years ago.  The papers were like magic to me.  My old rescuer described the people, places, and events that gave birth to these pages.  I was amazed by the plasticity of human expression, by history itself.  How come he couldn't have been one of my professors?  I learned so much from these rescue missions, as he called them.  I learned from him that undying yearnings and ferocious curiosities are passions of the soul. 

Thank you, dear old man, Peter, the old librarian and reconciler of past relationships and events in the heart of the present moment.  What a gift you gave to me ... never mentioned on my transcripts ... always remembered in my thoughts, heart, and soul.

Never smoke in the stacks!