Words of wisdom shelved by apathy
The following fable was inspired by a recent attempt to visit the Spokane Public Library:
Hello. My name is Dewey Decimal No. 979.737. I am a book. Do not be deceived. I am not one of your sit-quietly-on-a-shelf “bookish” kind of books. I am a book with an attitude, a bad attitude.
What? You want a piece of me? Well, Mr. Tough Guy, don’t even think about dog-earing one of my pages, or the wrath of God will smite you about the head and shoulders – God, in my world, being an all-knowing, all-powerful Being called “The Librarian.”
Listen to me, pal. You even think about committing any textual harassment and She’ll nail your scalp to the Reference Desk and She’ll laugh while doing it. Yeah, that’s who I’m talking about. The one with the glasses.
Lately, though I’ve been sitting here on my little shelf coming to a slow boil over a different problem. I’m feeling a little bit … lonely. This last year, something weird has been going on in my world. Half the time – way more than half the time – my book pals and I are sitting here all by ourselves, lights out, not a soul anywhere. One of my book buddies calls this place “the dead zone,” although he’s not being as clever as he thinks he is, since his title is “The Dead Zone,” by Stephen King.
Anyway, the whole scene has become too weird. We’re sitting in our stacks, looking out through the plate glass windows onto perfectly glorious sunshiny days, and the whole place is locked up like a vault. Every few minutes, some forlorn sap will come up to the doors, lean his forehead on the glass and gaze inside. He’s probably looking for something he needs right away, like, “Tax Evasion for the Complete Idiot” or maybe something even more urgent, like some Edgar Allen Poe.
I want to say, heck, yeah, come on in. I want to jump off the shelf, scurry over to the front door and unlock it. But no book has that kind of mobility, not even my buddy a few racks over, “It’s Not About the Bike.”
One of my colleagues on another shelf – we call her “Pollyanna” – always tries to make excuses. Once she said that we shouldn’t worry, because it was probably a holiday or something and you can’t expect libraries to stay open every day. Well the “World Atlas” put her in her place. He flipped to his calendar on page 674 and showed her the definitive proof – it was a perfectly ordinary Tuesday. Then he started keeping track and figured out the appalling truth – we were closed five days a week: Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, Saturday and Sundays.
What the …? Try to make excuses for that, “Pollyanna.”
So all we can do now is sit around in the dark, hour after monotonous hour, waiting for Wednesday and Friday.
Geez, and what a zoo those two days are. When we finally open up, the place is jammed with desperate customers, shouldering their way through the aisles, sweeping books off the shelves, filling up entire shopping bags.
They figure they have to stock up when they can, and I don’t blame ‘em. Who knows when they’re going to cut us back even more? The next thing you know, the place’ll be open only “Seven Days in May” or maybe “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” (that’s a little book humor).
So, now you know why I have such a lousy attitude. We’re stuck here in the dark, in this fancy, expensive building, with nothing to do but twiddle our bar codes. I sure don’t blame it on the Librarian, that’s for sure. This wasn’t Her idea. I guess she’s not all-powerful.
The problem is with what we books like to call The World Out There. The people in The World Out There apparently decided we’re not important.
Yeah, well, if that’s what they think, I’ve got the perfect revenge. Me and my pals will just go on strike. We’ll shut our flaps, button up our jackets and close our covers. Then we’ll see how much they miss their library. If people in The World Out There need a book or a DVD, well, they can just go to the store and whip out their wallets.
I want to make ‘em pay. I mean that literally.