Library Day

Friday I'm going to be speaking at the Wake County Public Library staff development day as part of a panel with four other writers. This makes me happy, not because I am particularly ecstatic over doing panels, but rather because I love libraries. In high school, I spent a couple of years as the volunteer gofer at our synagogue library; when other kids were hanging out during break between Monday night classes, I was shelving books. I actually laughed at the "Conan the Librarian" bit in UHF : Don't you know the Dewey Decimal System? And summers during elementary school meant a lot of riding my bike over to the East Cheltenham Library (the newer building in one of the old elementary schools, not the old one that showed up in the index of weird places in Loren Coleman's revised edition of Mysterious America . I am sad to report that the building in question was torn down long ago) and taking out as many books as I could handle; I think the record for one load was 18, and the book on the top of that stack was a prose translation of the Iliad. 

Good memories, good times.

So, speaking at a library? A no-brainer. Long may they loan.