I've Seen It All at the Library by Jonathan M. Farlow

Author:Jonathan M. Farlow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Published: 2015-04-13T00:00:00+00:00

7

Does Your Family Tree Fork?

My dad told me something on my first day as a full time employee at the library. “Stay busy,” he said. “Nobody wants to see you standing around. If you can’t find enough to do, you ask somebody.” Of course this is also the same person who told me that one of the things he learned in the army was never, never, volunteer for anything. I did try and follow his first piece of advice and was never one to claim that “it’s not in my job description” when I was asked to do something. I will say, however, that this mantra has served to get me some of the jobs that nobody else wanted.

My father has always had a rather unusual way of teaching me life’s little lessons. One summer when I was home from college he came home with an old fashioned mule plow in the back of his truck. That is one of those plows that you would hitch behind a team of mules and plow with in the days before tractors. He got me to help him unload it and then carry it to a field that he rented to grow vegetables. Once it was there we hitched it behind my father’s tractor, and then while he pulled it back and forth across the field, I attempted to steer it. Now picture this in your mind, stereotypical old man in a straw hat driving the tractor and pulling the plow and young kid with long hair and ripped jeans trying to steer it. One thing that I learned really quickly was that these plows do not stay up and go straight on their own. You have to hang on and force them to do so. If the blade hits a stick, a rock or even a compacted section of earth, it will jump and the long wooden handles you are holding on to try and steer it, might come up into your chin, your stomach, maybe even your groin. It was not a pleasant experience and after we were done and I was lying on the ground in a fetal position I asked my Dad why we just did that. He had a tractor that could plow perfectly. What was the point of bringing in the antique?

“I just wanted you to see how we used to do it,” he responded. What he meant was that he wanted to show me how good I had it and this was a valuable lesson. That’s why I never complained about having to be on the reference desk for longer than two hours or carrying a big box of donated books from a patron’s car to the library or cleaning the leakage from a kid’s diaper because the parent simply snatched him up and left, leaving his mess all over the library’s floor. Okay, maybe I did complain about that last one, but what I’m trying to get across is that working in a library is not a hard job.

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