Today I got shushed in the Library

Saturday. 9-5 shift, with only a half hour for lunch. It's tough sledding. 9-11 I was down on the Reference Desk, and it was slow. No, I mean s-l-o-w. At one point, I actually thought I heard paint drying. Yes, it was that slow.

At 11 I went up to the Information Desk. That's on the ground floor. Where people first come into the Library, where they go to put books on reserve, ask for tax forms. The next two hours went by fairly fast; even so, I got a lot of posting done on this blog - do take a look.

Went to lunch at 10 past 1. Thirty minutes ain't much: punch out, go upstairs, put food in the microwave, and over five minutes are already gone. If I want to slow down for eight minutes, that means I have about 17 minutes to eat.

Headed back to Info Desk. Worked it for an hour. Took a break, and went down to Reference for the day's last two hours. At lunch I'd read about Dürer, so when I got back to Reference, on the lower level, where non-fiction is kept, I walked into the 700s, the Art section, and got three books on Dürer.

Looking at one, I got so wrapped up that I failed to notice a patron. Excuse me, he said. Seeing a young man wearing a Michigan sweatshirt, I asked his pardon, and said that I'd gotten wrapped up in reading about this artist, Dürer.

Really, he said; I just took an exam on him. I asked, you go to Michigan? He said, no, a friend gave it to me. Turned out he is going to Cornell. I told him about reading the article in the WSJ. He wanted to know the URL. I told him it probably would require him to be a subscriber, and offered to simply print it out for him. My professor will probably get a kick out of it, he said. I found the call number for the book he wanted, and he went off to find it.

At 4pm Dr. Eisenberg came along. Julius Eisenberg is 84 years old. Loves to talk, and can talk with one librarian after another after another, and at length with each. We often talk about old movies as a start, and then go on to other topics.

A few days ago he told me the tale of how he got into medicine, and said I owed him a story about how I got into librarianship; I told him the story a couple of days ago. We've also discussed writing. I've told him of my attempts at writing, and he's told me of his frustration at not being able to write his memoirs.

Today I was talking about the writing classes I've taken, and about going to the Civil War Round table (He went to Gettysburg for his honeymoon; his wife hated it, and has hated every other trip they've taken to Civil War sites in the succeeding fifty or so years).

As I began to tell him about stories, both in book and in short story form, that I've tried over the years, our voices got loud. After a while a patron came over (I'd seen him before, and recognized as a Saturday regular). Not meaning to insult anyone, he said, could you lower your voices? I'm having trouble concentrating.

I held my temper, said nothing. Dr. Eisenberg, Julius, apologized, and said of course. Once the guy left we looked at one another, and Julius said weak power of concentration. We both twittered, and snickered -- quietly, of course.

Nice; he's 84, I'm 55, and we giggled. That's how libraries are. I'd said to Julius that what I liked about library work is its focus on knowledge. In my corporate career, the focus was on a barrel of oil (at Hess), a mutual fund (Dreyfus), an insurance policy (MetLife), computer systems - but as a librarian, the focus is information, knowledge. Helping people, chatting with people, giggling, answering questions, discussing Dürer, offering someone a printout, an anecdote, getting knowledge from others, hearing stories. Now, that's working.