Never underestimate the power of the spoken word

Wow! The power of the librarian...yesterday, a mom at the OD approached me and thanked me for preventing nightmares in her house. It seems that Pink, the voracious reader, had come home with HP #4 and when pressed, said, "It's all Sarah Louise's fault." The mom defended me, and though she had missed my talk, her husband had saved my parents & kids guide. (By the way, Pink just got new shoes, and they are pink and black...when I saw them, I said, "gee, if I had worn my pink shoes, we would have matched!")

Which brings to mind a situation that came up on Saturday. A kid (about 11 or 12, though he looked 13 or 14) was at the desk when I came on at 1pm. He wanted to get Jaws 3. For some unknown reason, the computer wouldn't allow it. So I called the library that owned the movie and said, is there some loan rule that I'm not seeing? (Loan rules determine who can take out an item or if an item can be taken out over the computer; some items can only be checked out if you show up in person) I assumed it was an item issue, not a patron issue--the librarian checked the kid's card and said, oh, he has a child card. Which means that at that library a person under 12 0r 13 (I don't know when our county considers kids are "adults" on their library card) can't take out "adult" movies. Now, as a librarian, I believe it is not my right to say when a child should read a book or watch a movie, but the parent's right to choose. Luckily, his mom was standing with him as the whole scene was unraveling, and I just put Jaws 3 on her card. I'm glad our library doesn't have restrictive loan rules, but I do understand why one might want restrictions: Pink watched the third HP movie at a slumber party, and her mom didn't know ahead of time. In our library, Harry Potters 1-3 are shelved in the children's section, 4-6 are shelved in the young adult department. We do not restrict "children" from going to the YA department, but I'm always grateful for the few words I exchange with a puzzled youth or parent who can't find the first three or the last three. "Where are the rest of the Harry Potter books?" "Well, in our library, we shelve the first three books in the Children's Dept and the last three in the Young Adult Dept." We don't have a young adult movie section--will Harry Potter #4 the movie (next year when the DVD is released) be in the Children's AV Dept? Probably.

I told Pink's mom that we shelve #4 in the YA department and she took that in; she thought she might call the library where Pink checked out Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (#4) and see what their shelving policy is.

I applaud parents that have these conversations with librarians and with their own kids. I remember reading my mom's Good Housekeeping when I was 11 or 12 and having to look up the word "rape" because there was an article where a woman was gang-raped by her doctor and two other doctors. My mom probably never realized that article was there--my mom probably never knew half the stuff I read. She wouldn't let me watch soap operas, which I did, behind her back. Looking back, though my senior year was my most rebellious year, I was a pretty rebellious kid. I still am. (And I would never have admitted this to my sister, but now that she's 23 and I'm 33, I'll admit it.) (Sis is one of my most celebrated fans.) Tell me not to do something, and darn if I won't pursue that thing relentlessly. I remember watching The Joy Luck Club over and over (for a while it was the only video I owned) and the words come to my mind unbidden, "There are only two kinds of daughter, obedient daughter and disobedient daughter. Only one kind of daughter can live here." It was either when the protagonist stopped playing piano or her arch-rival stopped playing chess. I think it was the former. Another scene from that movie returns to me daily this past few days, when the one mother (in her childhood flashback) finds her voice and learns to scream, after her mother kills herself because she can't speak truth into her own life. We're learning in Beth Moore's study, "Believing God," that the spoken word has more power than the thought word. What about the written word? The pen is mightier than the sword and all that... It's almost ten o'clock and I've spent the morning reading the Bible, Oswald, and my notes from last week's B. Moore study. I have dishes to wash, laundry to do, phone calls to make...anyways, just a few thoughts from a librarian that loves her pink sneakers. Joke, I'll post a picture of actual pink sneakers (that don't look red) soon. But I'm not going to change my profile pic because I really like it, and *I* know the shoes are pink.