A piece in the NY Times  today, March 17, about Elizabeth Diamond returning a book to the library only 63 years overdue brought a flood of memories to me. To begin I still have an active library card with the Rundel Central Library in the Monroe County Library System. this was not always my primary library. When I was growing up, the neighborhood library was the Monroe Avenue Branch. It had two entrances, down the stairs to the door under the main door which gave entrance to the children’s section and up the grand stairs to the ADULT section. By the time I was old enough to go up those stairs we had moved and I was using the well stocked and well maintained school library at Monroe High School. I know it was well staffed, I was one of the students staffing it. We shelved books memorizing the Dewey Decimal System in the course of that work,  and tallied the circulation numbers for the head Librarian (yes, capitalized, she was that important). 

Eventually I went off to college where the John Hay Library was the book haven of book havens. For any Brown alumni reading this, that was before the Rock was built. It was in the reading room of that library that I learned of the assassination of John F Kennedy. Although the “Hay” was my home library when visiting  my family in Rochester I used the University of Rochester library to work and just BE in a library. 

At Columbia I worked in the Business School library which was suspended over the gym so the floor had a certain flexibility to it. Other than that and the glorious view out to a new building going up to obstruct the nonview the windows had had been built to take in my memories are limited. I guess because I never came to see it as more than a convenient stopping place. 

Before I return to Rochester I need to make two brief stops.  As 12 year olds our group from Camp Cherokee in Saranac Lake NY went on a canoe trip and eventually we put in to Raquette Lake NY to wait for the camp truck to give us a truck portage to another lake. We discovered the town had a library that was open! We went in to see what it had to offer and we borrowed some books to read on the lawn while we waited. Another story, oft told, my mother decided I need some help reading and arranged for me to spend 6 weeks at a reading camp run by Syracuse University on the campus of a Vanderbilt Camp in the Adirondacks, near Raquette Lake Village. This was after my sophomore year in high school. I was obligated to read at least 4 hours a day! I promised the staff that if they left me to my own devices I would do at least that. They believed me. After 4 weeks I told them I had read every book in the nice little library they had provided and would they please go get more books, anything they thought I might read. I’ll spare you the Moby Dick story saving it for another day.

Eventually I returned to Rochester with Carol who is, if possible more interested in reading than I am, where we immediately got adult library cards in the Monroe county Public Library system, First in the Town of Pittsford and later in Brighton. We moved to the city and started to haunt the Rundel and the new main library across the street which is a three block walk from our apartment when we are in town. Now I access that library from anyplace there is an internet connection to borrow books. I get a thrill every time I open the link and see:

We wait; for our second shots; for the power to come back on; for the phone system install to be completed; for Washington politics to put the past behind us and move forward; for quotes from another project; for data so I can complete a power point presentation; not for Godot! 

Much of this waiting has me up in the early morning just like in the old days when I worked. I know as soon as I get caught up and the deadlines have passed; I will find a way to create or accept new ones. 

I wrote the above a month ago and never got back to it; most of the waiting is past. The politics have moved on; and the telephone project I worked on for over a year is complete. We are doing the final verification that everything works. I spent much of the day going to sites on my list that did not answer the phone so I could verify that they rang. 

Somehow the idea crossed my mind that with this project complete I might find nothing to do. I heard that a committee to search out back up power generators for critical areas in the resort needed a chair. I don’t know much about generators; but I know how to organize a committee and delegate work. So I have been meeting with our Maintenance Manager and another volunteer who is a retired electrical contractor and various vendors. When the quotes come in, I’ll get the committee together to review the results and make a decision to take to the community and to the Board. Then I will need to find some other way to keep busy. Carol says the next projects will fall in my lap, or more likely on my head.

We have made a couple of trips to San Diego to get Carol vaccinated and a couple of trips to Menifee to get me vaccinated. Somehow we were not able to get our shots on the same day; at the same place; but we are both vaccinated and in another week we will both be two weeks out. A certain sense joy and freedom is greeting many of us as we are getting our shots. Still wearing masks and keeping our distance, but it is more about making everyone feel included and safe.

When we were in San Diego we met with Jing and Ron. Jing was a caregiver to my mother; providing massage therapy when she was in the Summit and later when she was in the nursing home. They have a lovely apartment with great views of the harbor and over the airport. We walked to a Japanese restaurant where we were able to be seated outdoors. The weather was fine and we had a grand time. The drive to San Diego is about 90  minutes and there are mountain routes and coastal routes if we don’t need to scurry along the freeway. 

For now we are looking forward to some quiet time with zoom meetings. We are starting to think about what our schedule might look like after April. We do love it here, but hitch itch will rear its ugly head one day and it would be nice to have some sort of thoughts. Maybe Rock Spring WY for Escapade in July would work with a trip back to Rochester for Jazz Fest the end of July on the RIT Campus? But that only takes care of July. Will there be any hope of driving to Canada and putting Saskatchewan and Manitoba on our list of states and provinces finally? I doubt it.  People talk about plans, we talk about hopes. People reserve campsites months in advance, we call from the road at 2 PM  unless we really know where we want to be next week. 

Watch this space for decisions.