Lessons from a Library

I love being a librarian. This has been the PERFECT summer job for me! I am so excited to go to work every day. I love wearing long, flow-y skirts and a name tag (and people actually look at it and call me by my name!). It's a small-town library with lots of regulars who are always super friendly and cheerful.

There are also volunteers that come in to help us shelve books and my favorite volunteer is this elderly man named Robert. He's probably in his seventies and a foot shorter than me, but he always has a smile on his face and he calls me "dear". At the beginning of each week, he brings in roses from his garden so that we can have them on our desks. He doesn't know what their official name is, so he calls them his "Oh My" roses, because when you smell them, you just want to say, "Oh My!". It always makes me so happy to see him when he walks in.

And quite simply, I just love being surrounded by books. I hadn't truly realized how much I read as a child until I spent time in the children's and young adult sections and recognized titles upon titles that I had read myself! I used to go to the library often with my parents and it was fun to reminisce about those times in my life that have long since gone. There is something about books that calms me down. I was having a rough morning the other day, and then I went to work for my afternoon shift. After being there for four hours, I felt much better. I think that it has something to do with the timelessness of literature. Good stories transcend time, conflict, bitterness, and strife. Moreover, this is probably one of the biggest reasons why I fell in love with Classics when I arrived at Berkeley last year. Epics such as the Iliad and the Odyssey have been around for thousands of years, and have survived countless wars and misery, yet, for those who care to read them, they still offer inspiration and hope. Those sorts of stories are what connect us to those certain threads of humanity that are weaved throughout time and culture. Simply being in a close proximity to those sorts of stories makes my own worries and problems seem vastly short-lived in comparison.

Speaking of Classics, I intend to do a post on what that major entails sometime in the near future. That has definitely been the question that I've been asked the most since I've been home - "So what exactly do you study in Classics?". Hopefully I'll be able to put a lot of questions to rest!

Finally, I look forward to utilizing Berkeley's libraries a lot more in the years to come. I didn't venture there very often last year, but now that this library at home is becoming a sort of safe haven for me, I look forward to spending more time in the libraries at school. Next year is certainly going to be an adventure :).

Sincerely,
Olivia