Meanwhile, The World Goes On

November 1, 2014
Saturday

Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile, the world goes on.
— Mary Oliver, b. 1935, American poet
from “Wild Geese.”

NaBlo2014My to-do list for yesterday:

  • pay property taxes
  • get haircut
  • submit story to two literary journals
  • restart life

I paid the property taxes in the morning, the second installment of what I call “the July tax,” to distinguish it from “the February tax,” for the months that the bills come. The July tax can be paid in three installments. The second was due October 31. I wrote the check, prepared the sending envelope and the self-addressed stamped envelope for the receipt, and dropped it in the mailbox outside the post office on my way to get my hair cut.

Then I drove an hour to Lititz, Pennsylvania for the haircut. It was just a trim — shape up the ends. My regular hairdresser, the salon owner, is at home with her newborn. She’s been cutting my hair since about this time two years ago. She was Lynn’s choice for her wedding, and I’ve stayed on because she does good work and the trip is pleasant. She’ll be back to work in time for my next color service. An hour’s drive is not burdensome for me to get good service, although I do miss the hairdresser I left for this one, also an hour’s drive, whose work is also excellent. I am torn.

After the haircut I drove about ten minutes to the campus of the college both Lynn and I graduated from. I submitted the two stories from a computer in what is being called the Francine McNairy Library and Learning Forum at Millersville University. I still call the structure “the new library.” It opened in 1967, my junior year. It was named for Miss Helen Ganser, 1891-1990, the college’s first professional librarian.* I was a ride-along with a young journalist dispatched to interview her prior to the dedication of the library. It was that experience and, a few months later, the release of Simon and Garfunkel’s Bookends that sparked my interest in “the elderly” and a summer’s service as an aide in a nursing home. Miss Ganser was 76 when I met her. That does not seem so awfully old now.

Although the structure is still called Ganser Hall, the name of the library has been changed to honor the first black woman president of a university in the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education. She was president for almost ten years, after serving nine years as provost. Miss Ganser was Millersville’s librarian for 41 years.

I will confess to feeling sad at the apparent demotion of Miss Ganser’s memory. At least her name has been retained, sort of. The dormitory I lived in my junior year, Landes Hall, was demolished and replaced with a classroom building named for someone else. To my knowledge, Miss Amanda Landes is not honored anywhere else on campus.

The new new library is breathtaking in its state-of-the-artness. It was in 1967 as well, although people who didn’t know the space until the 1990s or so are baffled by that description of it. I tried to get my bearings by looking at the floor plan in a visitor’s brochure. I knew I was standing where the circulation desk had always been, but I felt disoriented. I asked the young woman at the desk where the books were. She did not seem to understand my question.

I eventually found the books, or some of them, in tightly packed rolling stacks in a basement area. I’d used a staircase at the corner of a glass-walled atrium that I think is completely new to get there. I think I was standing in the part that had been classrooms back in the day, where I took Reference Materials and Hebraic Philosophy, and where I sometimes used a microfilm reader to consult The New York Times, then kept in boxed reels on shelves in a special room just for that publication. Back then there were 116 years of the square boxes to keep track of. They took up just one wall. The other walls stood empty and waiting, because there was the rest of time to plan for.

I do not know where The New York Times is kept now  Very likely it’s accessed digitally, with not even a sliver of a microfiche to hold in your hand. I also do not know where the elevator is in that area now. I walked through an exit door marked “staff only” because my car was just across the street, and I was ready to leave. No alarm sounded.

It was a head-clearing trip. I’ve been having a hard time these past several weeks — fuzzy thinking, fatigue, sadness. All the signs of Seasonal Affective Disorder, a depression with no external cause (no precipitating event) and no clear way out. Last night I was able to cross off all the items on my to-do list, and go to bed ready to restart my life today, the first of a new month, one of my favorites, despite its march into the darkest time of the year.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

I did spend some of my prayer time this morning sighing over certain situations, in particular an estrangement that has troubled me. Having been the greater offender in the quarrel, I knew it was my place to start the rapprochement, but I didn’t know how. This afternoon, the other party made the first move. Praise God from whom all blessings flow.

Meanwhile, the wild geese, high in the clean blue air
are heading home again.

*The Wikipedia article is inaccurate on several points. The new library opened in the fall of 1967. Old Main was not demolished until 1968. The library building stands on a tract adjacent to where Old Main was.




statistics in vBulletin


2 thoughts on “Meanwhile, The World Goes On

  1. Let me get this straight. You were in a library and your question, “Where are the books?” Was difficult to understand.

  2. I meant “I asked the young woman at the desk where the books were. She did not seem to understand my question” to be light hyperbole. I’m sure she knows where the books are, but directing a patron to the particular area she might want takes more probing. Actually, there is very little paper on the first floor. Lynn reports that she rarely handled print media in her time at Millersville. She used the library for electronic research and for meeting with small study groups. It is possible to write a high-level academic paper without consulting any print media, even in the humanities, because so many resources are available electronically. (You have to have access to a given library’s subscriptions. This can be arranged for scholars and researchers who are not necessarily students or faculty at a particular school.)

    From the visitor’s guide: “The library has hundreds of thousands of books available for checkout. Many of our books can be found on Lower Level One (LL1) on high-density compact shelving.” Check out http://blogs.millersville.edu/newlibrary/ for an article about the two-year renovation and pictures of the high-density shelving.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *