When I was approached about writing a piece for an audience of librarians, one thought crowded out a
When I was approached about writing a piece for an audience of librarians, one thought crowded out all the others—of which there were many. I will begin with the one because it is the best and only way I know how to write about my own lifelong experience with you, our keepers of books, stories, and knowledge. My first novel, The Courtesan, is dedicated to my younger sister, my only sibling. She was not a librarian, but she should and could and would have been had she not died many years before she was finished with the pleasures of being alive. She was a great reader, a voracious consumer of books and stories and knowledge. She spent untold hours of her life thinking and talking about books, encouraging her own and other children to read, and volunteering in libraries. These were pastimes that gave her enormous joy. They were the things that she loved. As her cancer progressed, my sister brought books by the armload home from the Wilton Public Library in Connecticut, a place that became her last library. A stay-at-home-mother at the time, a woman with a formidable business career behind her and huge potential ahead, she was offered a job at the Wilton Library just as her cancer entered its most aggressive and final phase. It was a job she would at any other time and under any other circumstances have ached to take. She had to say “no”, but she continued to read when she couldn’t sleep, while enduring the poisons of chemo, when she was alone, and while she sat with one eye on her children doing their homework. She read, I am sure, to distract herself from the terrible truth of her cancer and to glean what she could from what remained of her life.When my sister died, the awful business of applying for her certificate of death loomed before any of us was ready. It was the evidence delivered much too soon: Decedent’s Legal Name…Sex…Social Security Number…Final Place of Residence. Decedent’s Usual Occupation….It was our mother’s last gift to her daughter and my sister, Judith Gambrill Brewer, to propose that we list her ‘Usual Occupation’ as that of librarian. She had been a wife and a mother, a woman with other careers, but a librarian is what she would most joyfully have been had the fates not intervened.So what I have to say to you, my audience of librarians, is thank you. Thank you for valuing books and all that they mean to the human experience. Thank you on behalf of my sister and her children—and on behalf of all of us whose lives are enriched by reading.- Alexandra Curry -- source link
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