[Sca-cooks] OP: "Why I am in love with librarians"

[Jadwiga Zajaczkowa / Jenne Heise]

Ok, so it's OP but I found it again and had to share it again:

Why I Am in Love with Librarians
by Julia Alvarez -- 1/15/2003

I love how they know things
only to pass them on,
how they fade into the faux-wood-paneled
walls of the reference room,
their faces hidden between the covers of books,

how they look up only to help you:
What is the capital of Afghanistan?
How do the Maori bury their dead?
Who invented Barbie? How many were murdered in Guatemala in '84?

-every query worthy of their attention,
any questioner taken seriously,
curiosity the only requirement.
I love how they listen, their lined faces opening,
their eyes already elsewhere:

scanning a plain for the lights of a distant city,
hunting for bodies in the highlands,
searching the web for Barbie-
their minds like those flocks of little birds in winter
swooping over a landscape, looking, looking.

And always when they get back to you,
that sweet smile on their faces,
pride and deep affection for what can be known,
as if Barbie's invention
or the tally of the massacred

could save you, could save the world!
And who knows if Stalin or Hitler
had spent their youth in the library,
history might be rewritten,
re-catalogued by librarians?

Curiosity sends us out
to a world both larger and smaller
than what we know and believe in
with a passion for finding an answer
or at least understanding our questions.

That road is paved with librarians,
bushwhackers, scouts with string
through the labyrinths of information,
helpers who disappear the moment
you reach your destination.


for Joy Pile

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Author Information
Julia Alvarez, currently writer-in-residence at Middlebury College, VT, is
the author of novels (In the Time of the Butterflies), books for young
readers, and books of poetry, including the forthcoming collection Keeping
Watch . Joy Pile is the Foreign Language Reference and Acquisitions
Librarian, Starr Library, Middlebury College
-- 
-- Jadwiga Zajaczkowa, Knowledge Pika jenne at fiedlerfamily.net 
"Fairy tales are not true--fairy tales are important, and they are not 
true, they are more than true. Not because they tell us that dragons 
exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be defeated."
-- G.K. Chesterton