In elementary school there are usually two plum roles a kid can have. One is being a member of the school patrol, the other is being a librarian’s assistant. I found my way through the back door to be on patrol, but I came through the front door to be a library assistant.
I have always loved the library, which is strange to me now because I rarely visit one. I think I’ve been in a public library twice in the past 15 years. I can thank Amazon.com and Zinio for that. It’s not that I don’t read books and magazines, I have just found it easier to do so on the iPad, since I can haul an unlimited number of books with me that are in “progress” without having to weigh myself down. Get tired of one book and start or return to another, all on a little pad. Amazing.
I do, however, miss the Dewey Decimal System. To be a library aide you had to know it backwards and forwards. I studied it for a long time, practicing until I knew where virtually every category of book could be found in the library without having to go to the card catalogue.
This wasn’t very hard in our school library, mind you. It was in the basement of Kennydale Elementary School. I can’t tell you exactly how large or small it was, since they tore it down years ago when they put up a new Kennydale Elementary School, which has since been torn down to make way for another new Kennydale, for reasons I’m not completely sure.
Anyway, back to the library. There were 23 library aides, one for each book in the library, I’m pretty sure. I only know this because I have a photo of the entire library aide “class.”
Yes, that’s me, the one on the left, looking like a little Nazi boy in my brown duds. Wayne Gibbs and Tom Dragseth are next to me. Behind me was my heartthrob, Karen Teichrow. No, not the ones with the glasses. The one in the middle, the white dress on who looks a little like a young Helen Reddy.
I’m not really sure if I wanted to be a librarian aide as much as I wanted to be around Karen. But that’s another story for another day.
Being a library assistant was pretty basic. You put away the books the other kids left out and you checked books out with that all important, slightly omnipotent date stamper and ink pad. I could whip through a stack of books quickly and efficiently. I rocked as a library aide – in fact, my entire working career may have peaked right there and then.
It’s funny what you hold in your head from your school daze. Me? I can still go into the library and find any book by any subject. I still know the DDS backwards and forwards. I know they’ve gotten rid of the card catalogue and substituted it with a computer, but I never need it. All I have to do is think of one of my many interests – music (780), general trivia and knowledge (030), history (970) or astronomy (520) and I’m off and running.
It wasn’t all fun and games being a library aide, I admit. I am still scarred by at least one incident. And no, I didn’t get caught in the romance section smooching Karen Teichrow. I wished I had, but I was too shy. Need evidence? I was a library assistant for godssake.
No, the embarrassing part occurred when winter came rolling around. Back in the day, schools could still have Christmas pageants and concerts. We weren’t as PC in the 1960s.
The holiday spirit abounded at Kennydale Elementary. The school went all out in celebrating all the important parts of Christmas – trees, Santa, reindeer, presents, candy canes and snow, even though we hardly ever got snow in Seattle during the holiday season.
Miss Hennen decided we should have a Christmas party for all the library aides. On the day of our party, we all brought goodies in from home, we made paper chains out of green and red construction paper, held together by the time honored paste you applied with a stick that was attached to the lid of the paste jar. We made others out of aluminum foil. Christmas music, provided by the school turntable and records from the library, played in the background. We drank cider and ate cookies, and made Santas out of toilet paper rolls. Good times.
Then Miss Hennen changed things up a bit. She put on more peppy music. She said it was time to dance. I had not signed up for this gig. Even so, you’d think, man, this is the time to get close to Karen Teichrow. She likes you, you like her, you both even know it. The odds are in your favor. There are only three boys and 20 girls in the room. How can you miss?
I missed. For reasons I still can’t discern from the replay of the events that transpired that day, Karen didn’t end up in my arms. I ended up in Miss Hennen’s. Before I knew it we were dancing around the room. There was no way I would ever be able to escape her clutches or muscle in on Karen’s partner who was a much larger girl than I was a guy. No, I was stuck with Miss Hennen for the duration.
And then it happened. Overflowing with dance fever, Miss Hennen danced her way to the closed door that led into the hallway. Without missing a step and with me in awkward tow, she turned the door’s handle and out into the hall we went in full dance fever.
Standing there was my mother. So were a lot of other mothers. And then out of the corner of my eye I saw my brother Brian. He was convulsing. No, not from a seizure – I wish – but from laughter. He couldn’t hold it all in. He was laughing uncontrollably at the sight of me in the arms of Miss Hennen. I would never live this down.
I’d like to say it was the most embarrassing moment of my life. Perhaps at the moment it was. But there were so many worse moments to come for me, that dancing in the arms with Miss Hennen now seems like a lark. A tortuous lark, but a lark nonetheless.
In the Emerald City, thinking a date with a librarian is long overdue,
– Robb