A Loss for Words

by SpringRiver

copyright 2005 all rights reserved

 

"Perhaps no place in any community is so totally democratic as the town library. The only entrance requirement is interest." - Lady Bird Johnson

 

Last night, I read a book to my children.  Yesterday, I read letters from my hometown's founders of over a hundred years ago.  Today, I'm heading to the same resource to make copies and pick up a new read while my kids do research for school.  In the wake of flooding, death and absolute devastation in the south, we have lost more than property, lives and land.  We've lost the letters and voices, records of birth and death and the resource for all ages; all contained within the walls of the libraries destroyed by Hurricane Katrina.

 

It is the New Orleans Libraries that trouble me most.  The documents there, records and letters of slave and free, music, culture, all of it is gone.  Makes one see how whole civilizations can be lost in the blink of an eye.

 

Reports from all over the United States are coming in of displaced peoples arriving with elderly and children wearing nothing but the clothes on their backs.  While state and federal agencies are gathering money for food and water, clothing and medicine, please consider a donation of another type.

 

While sending books to New Orleans at present is ridiculous as it is predicted that the water removal alone could take another eighty days, consider the refugee who has come to your own home town.  While donating a check or stopping into a fundraiser, drop off a book for a mother to read to her child before they sleep yet another night in an unfamiliar motel.  Offer a displaced elderly person a book on tape to listen to, perhaps blocking out the unfriendly noise of a shelter in a strange city or an assisted living nursing home.

 

One might even consider a gift from the heart; giving a book from one's own personal library.  A used book means only that it has been read and deserves to be shared.  Remember...

 

"Second hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack." - Virginia Woolf

 

Wouldn't it bring you joy to hear a parent reading "Good Night Moon" to a child; explaining that they will sleep under the same moon, just in a different place?  Would it not make your soul sing to see a group of young adults crowded around one another to hear their friend read "Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince" aloud?  And if this doesn't convince you, would it not make you feel like you could do something to make a change if you invited that senior to your red hat book club, only to find she is a poet?

 

 "People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading." - Logan Pearsall Smith