IGNORE THAT SOUR WOMAN BEHIND THE CURTAIN
A new acquaintance gravely listened to the spiel on my nfp, and then asked "but what do you do all day?"
Not enough. A disproportionate amount of begging. An extraordinary amount of heavy lifting. So much in the trenches, and in the moment, work that high-powered friends are disappointed. Surely I should turn all those law-related skills to appropriate work such as legislative lobbying, right? Why do I sit on floors and talk with kids? Shouldn't I have a book out by now?
So I need pictures like these. We just reopened this reading room in Harvey, Illinois, a dirt-poor southern suburb of Chicago. Our first Harvey quarters in early 2006 were located in a 1940's no-tell motel building which, with two trailers, constituted the site facilities. In the town of Harvey, the library has no new books, and few old ones. How improverished can it be? The library had no capital fund to fix a roof that would have destroyed the computers and books. The library is so poor that in 2009 it advised its more than 80 percent African-American community that it must defer any celebration of Martin Luther King Month.
In Harvey, the public schools lack a library. Any extant books are invariably out of print.
In Harvey, you are a 30-minute drive to any decent library. You are a 30-minute drive to any real bookstore, even assuming that you had (you don't) any money.
Thus even this modest reading room is magical for kids who have never been to a library, or to any library with this many new books, or to any place pleasing to looking at, or to even one corner of the world that is quiet. You can read by yourself, or hear read-aloud, or join a bookclub. You can listen to audiobooks, or a CD of the birds of Africa, or read chapbook poems by Sarah Bennett, or examine a Peters Projection map. You can talk with the puppets, or memorize a poem. Or you can drag a friend in the door, and push him to ask for his own copy of this really great book that you just finished. And even though that lady is a real sour-puss, you know that she will say yes.
Unless you are asking for The Wimpy Kid, which ticks her off, big-time.
HERR KEPLER'S NOTEBOOK
Time is the bully anchor of the opposing tug-rope team.
The person with a happy home life tracks glitter through the world; the solitary person leaves snowprints.
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"The grasshopper warbler's song comes up out of the earth just as you think the day is quietening down. It has no prelude or warm-up: it starts midperformance, as if switched on by the dark, as it if has been singing like this beneath the earth until it was dark enough to come to the surface. As if, though we hardly hear it, this singing never stops."
A Year on the Wing (Tim Dee)
All writing and cartoons on this site copyright 2008-2010 Julia Martin, unless otherwise credited.
The person with a happy home life tracks glitter through the world; the solitary person leaves snowprints.
-------------------------------------
"The grasshopper warbler's song comes up out of the earth just as you think the day is quietening down. It has no prelude or warm-up: it starts midperformance, as if switched on by the dark, as it if has been singing like this beneath the earth until it was dark enough to come to the surface. As if, though we hardly hear it, this singing never stops."
A Year on the Wing (Tim Dee)
All writing and cartoons on this site copyright 2008-2010 Julia Martin, unless otherwise credited.
God, I think it's extraordinary. & I think you're wonderful.
ReplyDelete(Sorry, I know you don't like gushing. But sometimes a person has to gush!)
So kind!
ReplyDeleteBut it's the only site at which I've managed to establish a real room, and the glimmer of a community of readers. If I had replicated at each of the more than 40 after-school sites at which kids receive Greater Chicago Food Depository meals AND provided each with a designated reader-in-chief, that would be a start. Thus a trickle is more apt.
For example, a heartbreaker site finally assigned me a room last Fall. The kids, who redefine damaged and vulnerable, actually evidenced some excitement. Management demanded a hurry-up build-out, which I swung. Then less than three weeks later, the site suddenly reappropriated the space as an office. I walked in one day to find the books thrown on the floor, under layers of construction debris.
At other sites, I do read-aloud, book distributions, library tours and take kids to bookstores on whatever episodic basis they can manage. Without an ongoing relationship with the kids or a room, however, no real gains are made.
The high-powered friends are right: I need to be speaking to the folks with cash and power. And I'm right: I need to spend more time reading on the floor.
This one got me. Kudos to you.
ReplyDelete