Tonight, I Celebrate My Love for You...#4



    So....it's been awhile for one of these types of posts and I'm ready to do several. Don't worry, I won't go overboard. I don't have that kind of time. Track has started and now I live at school for double-digit hours, go home, eat, walk the dogs, get half of something done, watch some Malcolm in the Middle, and then fall asleep after reading about 2.5 pages of something I've waited all day to read. So, you have no fear of having to read hundreds of posts about things I like!

  The last phrase/sentence may seem a little odd to some of my loyal readers and I know it would sound strange to many of my students. There have been many times in the last eight years of teaching and coaching that I have been accused of not liking anything almost to a depth of being incapable of liking anything. And the conversation and conclusion usually goes something like this:

"Mr. Dark, don't you just die laughing everytime Adam Sandler talks?"

"He's funny sometimes, but I can think of funnier guys."

"Yeah right. Wasn't (Fill in the blank Adam Sandler movie title) the funniest movie ever made?"

"I didn't really see that, but his movies are usually just the same routines that he does in every movie. Like I said, I think he is kind of funny, but not that funny."

"I guess you just hate every movie."

  And so, I have been forced on multiple occasions of self-preservation to prove that I'm capable of liking things and at times loving them. There was even a time when I carried a transparency around with me from class to class of 100 things I like. And whenever a student began a conversation that I felt was going to end in the usual, "I guess you hate everything because you don't like what I like." routine, then I would just flash my little, trusty transparency up and let it talk for me. Now granted, most of those things were not things they would like, but I thought everyone's "likes" were personal, but I've been wrong before.

 So, the item that holds the #4 place on my, "Tonight, I Celebrate My Love For You" List is....

The Library



   I have had a long relationship of both complete love and complete hate with the library. My earliest memories of the library are from the "Media Center" at Tavares Elementary and they are full of good books and Friday mornings spent watching fun movies like, "Rikki Tikki Tavi". I loved checking out books and seeing how many books they would let me take home. It seemed crazy. The school was giving me free books for a little while and when I got tired of them, I could bring them back and get more. And if I took too long to read or look at the book, they would only charge us something like $0.05 a day. What a great deal!

  Flash forward several years, and the memories are both good and bad. Many times we would go to the library when I was homeschooled and we would practice using the Dewey Decimal System and get to check out books on whatever was really catching our attention at the time. I love doing both of these. I actually got pretty good at using Dewey and if I can brag a little, I still kind of am. But these library visits would also be accompanied by us (my siblings and myself) doing some of our daily school work and getting asked by someone why we weren't in "real school". It used to make me feel bad about what I was doing because it felt hard and felt like school, but then some nosey, elderly person would tell me it wasn't "real school work". However, now that I'm older and a teacher, the work I was doing in "not real school" was so much harder and more intense than most of what I see going on at "real school", except in my classroom of course!

    Flash forward several more years, I am back to loving the library, but also basically living in one and quickly growing to detest the likes of a library. My grades in college were not always the best, but it was not for the lack of time spent studying and preparing. There were many times I would spend anywhere between 15-40 hours a week inside Mercer University's beloved Tarver Library. During study breaks, I would take a brisk walk outside or try to find the oldest books the library had. I loved doing this. I loved going in the Special Collections section and seeing all the First Editions and other collectible books, etc. However, by my senior year at Mercer, I was finding much more hate for the library than love and upon graduation I had made a clean break with libraries. It had been a good ride, but we were finished. I even had brief visions of never having to enter one again and for about two years, this was almost the case...Then I became a teacher.

  My new found love for library came to me while riding my bike around the not-so bike friendly city of Dothan, Alabama. I turned down a side street on my way to the post office and to my right was the Dothan Public Library. I went to the post office and was about to ride straight home, when I decided to spend a couple of minutes looking in the library because I was greatly intrigued by the very large and odd Tikki pole outside. I went in and once again realized my initial love of the library. They have all these great things: books, magazines, movies, documentaries, books on cd, etc and they will give them to you for about two weeks. When you get tired of them, you can come get new ones at no charge unless you are late and then it is only something like ten cents a day. I quickly got a library card. I checked out a couple books and several books on cd. I rode home on my bike quickly and began painting my living room while listening to, John Adams, on cd. I tried to listen to James Joyce's, Ulysses, but the mix of stream of consciousness writing and paint fumes were not an ideal mix.

  And this is how my feelings for the library have stayed. Mel and I often go to the library here in Macon. We check out several books at a time and attempt to read through them. Mel is better at this than I am. We have been really late on some and paid our ten cent fine and moved on with our life. A ten day late fee adds up to a dollar, while a new book costs $15-$18. Not a bad trade off, right? We have currently begun taking part in the awesome program of library sharing, which is where your local library doesn't have a book, but another one does, your library calls them, and then the other library mails it to you. And all of it for free! Crazy!

 

 Our local library is Washington Memorial Library. We love it. The book selection is great. The fines are low. The librarians are helpful. And the library share program is getting larger by the week. And the place is pretty. Check the pic. (I know its a painting, but it really is a pretty place, especially in the Spring.)



Happy reading and visit your local library,

David