Wednesday, February 2, 2011

Confirmations of why I want to work in a library

So there are days, as I've been working as a shelver, that I forget why I want to work in a public library in the children's department in the first place. This is usually because I have a very low paying job which can be pretty hard work at times and makes me exhausted. However, there are days like Monday that I remember why I like working there. I got to meet a really cool and nice teenage volunteer who was half Turkish/half Sudanese, which to me is a very interesting combination all by itself, and we ended up talking for most of the 3 hours that I was working on Monday. Work always seems to go faster when you have someone cool to talk to. At another point in the night, I was straightening the board book displays and this little girl, probably 4 or 5 starts talking to me about the books she likes, "shadow books" she calls them. They are the black and white books, the kind that author Tana Hoban likes to do. I always am amazed when children will just come up and start talking to me in the library. The same thing happened last week when I was trying to find something to do at the end of last week and was going around the room, picking up books left on tables and shelving them. I went up to this one table where a brother and sister were sitting with a giant pile of books and asked them if they were finished with them. They still needed them, so I went to go sort some Easy Reader books when the little boy who I has spoken to, he looked about 9 or 10, came over and started talking to me. He told me about how he and his sister were doing book reports on birds, and he had picked the bald eagle and his sister had picked the ruby-throated hummingbird. I asked him if he had ever seen a hummingbird and he said yes, that they had all kinds of bird feeders in their lawn and were avid bird watchers. He was so precious with his earnestness and little glasses that I wanted to adopt him. The other thing that happened on Monday was a young girl, couldn't have been more than 3 or 4 was with her parents at a table next to the Easy Readers and came right up to me and hugged me and then kissed my stomach (because she was eye level with it). Her parents were horrified and apologized, but I simply said, "It's fine, it's better than being kicked." Being that I want to be a Youth Services Librarian, it is good that I am able to talk and interact with children like this.

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