My New Mission and More

I have a new mission in life, to get as many valid library cards as possible.

I started out with just our local system. The library closest to us is great. The librarians are helpful, the story times are well run and the catalog is online with the added bonus of online renewals. I average about three books every other week.

Then last summer I was stuck in Richmond with three bored kids (Jake was in Art class) and the temps were in the upper nineties. We found a branch of the city library system just a few blocks down the road. We perused the shelves in air conditioned comfort and I ended up getting a card so we could bring our treasures home.

Today I headed up to Richmond in search of semi-obscure books at the Library of Virginia. Nate has his monthly "share" (ie show and tell) this week and the theme is family heirlooms. He settled on a megillah that my Grandmother was given when she was in Germany just before the start of WWII. She was traveling through Europe meeting various makers of decorative end papers. Many of the guild members were Jewish and knew something terrible was going to happen. They pressed upon my non-Jewish grandmother all sorts of artifacts to bring back to the US, one of which is a megillah. The books I needed from the library tell a little bit about decorative end papers and one has a picture of my Grandmother. (I don't have any pictures of my Grandmother. She died when my mother was 21, a good fifteen years before I was born.)

So anyway, I now have three library cards. Maybe I should try to get a few more.