The Home Library

I am in the middle of a project to turn a junk room in my house into a home library. That picture up above... that is not it! That is just something I saw on Pinterest. However it is inspiration.

This room that will be my library has been a junk room forever! It is one of two rooms in the house that you do just not go into. For a long time I have been meaning to clear it out. However my dreams were not big enough. That is what I am learning, that in order to get anything done, you have to make your plans big and exciting, perhaps even impossible. 

You have to dream the impossible dream!

Which is what my home library is. I would like this room to be a library in the Dark Academia, "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" tradition. I want tall bookcases that go with each other. A globe. A Victorian bird cage. A beverage cooler and a bar.

When all these things are in place, this ancient library table will come up from the basement. This used to be our dining room table in the apartment where I used to live at 435 West Delavan. We bought it at an antique store on Niagara Street.

The table is still in the basement. I checked. It took me a while to find it however I finally located it covered in cobwebs.

Speaking of cobwebs, this room has been no picnic to clean out. It was actually an emotional moment when I was able to get to the window and open it. I honestly do not think the window had been opened for 20 years.

I actually had to vacuum books. There were books covered in cobwebs! I inherited my father's library so all of this situation is not my fault. However it got extremely discouraging confronting the dirt and disorder. At times I got very hot in the summer heat, and I felt like giving up.

Had I just been thinking, "I need to clean this room up," I would have quit.

However I would just picture my home library.

Think of it! Like out of "Brideshead Revisited." Like out of "The Secret Garden." I picture it. I imagine having my friends over for drinks in my home library. And I get back to work.

My home library! I will post my progress.

It will happen!

Back to the Library

 

Besides going back to the Broadway Market I have also gone back to the library. 

The library is no longer charging if books are overdue or anything. I am not sure how they are going to get a lot of books back under those circumstances, however I have no degree in library science so what do I know. 

I want my money back for all the fines I once had to pay!!

Plus more money, for pain and suffering!

Read my saga of library adventures here.

For now however I borrowed two books. They are biographies. One is on the illustrator N.C. Wyeth and the other is on the Revolutionary War leader Baron von Steuben. 

Above is a picture I snapped of the N.C. Wyeth book. Slightly visible to the right is this giant book on Mozart I also looked into -- however just a glance told me it was really boring. For a Mozart book to look boring to me means something, I will tell you that. 

It was lucky I did not like the Mozart book because it must have been 800 pages. As it was I could barely cram N.C. Wyeth and Baron von Steuben into my backpack for the trip back to the Hyatt where Howard was playing.

I have been reading both books and I will have to write my thoughts on each one because I am tired of trying to bore my friends with details. The N.C. Wyeth book is interesting because my dad read us "Treasure Island" when we were little, and it had his pictures.

Blind Pew!

That is not the sort of picture you forget!

It was weird looking into the book when I was in the library, reading about Wyeth's son Andy, and then realizing, that is Andrew Wyeth. Since beginning to read the book I have found some videos on YouTube interviewing Andy and his sisters and brother about the old man. By the way I really do believe that N.C. was the best artist of them all and that is saying something. I mean, Blind Pew, look at him. Who in the world would have come up with that?

I admire the family for being so honest about everything, especially in the book. It is a strange family saga. Most family sagas are strange however people are not always honest about them. The family seems to have understood that N.C. belongs to the world, not just to them, and they do not keep things under wraps.

Sometimes it gets to you, reading a book like this. You just start feeling in the middle of it all and one night I was lying awake, just thinking about this family. Oh, this is funny, Andrew Wyeth, he married a girl from Buffalo. He got married in East Aurora, at her house, which was at 815 Fillmore Avenue, I think. It was in the book. I did a search online and I do not believe the house is there any longer. Buffalo and its surrounding townships are always knocking things down.

Andy Wyeth's wife was the daughter of the Courier-Express's art editor. Her name was Betsy James. I forget her father's name and the book is downstairs and I am too lazy to go down and get it. She met him in Maine when she was a teenager and her family was vacationing there. Summering there, the book said. Being a newspaper girl myself I am not sure how Mr. James was able to take summers off from his job at the Courier-Express. It must have been nice working for a newspaper in those days!

When Andy brought Betsy back to meet the family, N.C. yelled at him about bringing back girls in lipstick and shorts who looked as if they belonged on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post. Actually N.C. reminds me a lot of my dad. It is 'round midnight and I will have to get into that another time.

For now...

... sweet dreams!

Library therapy

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library.

The other day I was drawn into a sort of conversation with Brussels pianist Pierre-Arnaud Dablemont about the concert hall, responding to a post he wrote about if concert traditions still work in today's electronic society. I wrote about it on my, ahem, Music Critic Web log and I wrote I really valued the silence in the concert hall because there is noise almost everywhere else. It is the truth!

I found myself thinking about my experiences in the library, like when that bum tried to hit me up. 

Or remember the guy who kept following me around the music department? Ha, ha! I was just reading back on that and laughing.

Or the time I owed $140?

OK, enough memory lane. Today I have a new library story.

I was waiting for my friend Melinda to get through looking for I forget what, and so I was looking through New Biographies. There were all these biographies of Leonard Pennario's friends, I noticed. There was a big book on Loretta Young. While I was checking the book on Loretta Young to make sure Pennario was not in the index, I heard these voices behind me.

"So," this woman was saying, "what else would you like to talk about?"

Then came a man's voice. "Well, I was just at St. Luke's. You know St. Luke's Mission of Mercy? They have good food there. Free food. They had these cookies. The cookies were a little too sweet for me, but they were good, and ..."

I did have to turn then out of curiosity and sure enough, there were these two people, sitting across from each other at a library table. They were using the library as a counseling office!

Which, come on, you know? It was great that this gentleman enjoyed St. Luke's, but do we have to hear about this in the library? Couldn't they use a place like Brightside Counseling, which I saw when I was walking in Isle View Park the other day with my friend Michelle?

In all honesty though I have to admit, in my disgruntlement was a trace of envy.

"What else would you like to talk about?"

What a luxury, to be asked that question!

Sunday, quiet Sunday

Suddenly there is football and it is autumn! Today there was this long silence all afternoon while I cleaned my house and tended to Leonard Pennario business. And the rest of the city watched the Bills.

You can go out in the street and there is nobody there! And it is a great time to go to Wegmans.

When the Bills won you knew without watching because it is in the air. The guy next door roared, "Buffalo!" at the top of his lungs. Car horns blasted.

Let's go, Buffalo!!! Yay us!! We beat the Oakland Raiders. "The hated Oakland Raiders," as the paper put it.

I love these Sundays! This gets the fall off to a good start.

Here is what does not get the fall off to a good start. I stopped by the downtown library the other day, and what was in the entrance way but a display of Halloween books for kids. There were all these books on Wicca and Tarot cards and how-to books on witchcraft.

Zut alors and ick!!

Tarot cards give me the creeps.

Ick.

I do not even want those pictures on my Web log! Tomorrow I will take them down. But for now I just want to illustrate what I mean.

Plus isn't it funny how it is allowed to promote certain religions but not others? I do not see the library promoting my religion. Why not ...

On the bright side it is the fall eating season. And time to make fruitcakes. If you play your cards right (NOT your Tarot cards) and get started now you can have yummy fruitcakes on your holiday table in December.

This is the fruitcake I love to make. I must begin now to shop for the ingredients.

I will time my shopping trip to coincide with the next Bills game.

Desperado

My old nemesis, the library, is under investigation by the paper. That is our beauteous library pictured above! Apparently they have been crazily pitching books right and left and there is nothing that can be done. One criterion they apply, I read, is that if a book has not been checked out since 2008, that book could well be out the door.

Which sounds boneheaded to me. Isn't a library supposed to be where you can go and find moldy oldie books you would not find anywhere else?

You would think.

But now the library is like a teenager. It wants to be popular and cool. There is a cafe and music and slugs and oiks. There is the "F" word and noisy people on the computer.

Well, on the other hand, who cares. That is what Howard says about some things and I am picking it up.

With the library I am like the guy in "Gladiator."

The library has already done its worst to me and I have nothing left to lose.

They closed my cute historic little branch that was down the street, that I used to walk to, that was one reason I bought my house. There was another cute branch not that far from here but they went and closed that, too. Now our North Buffalo library is in a storefront in a strip mall. I refuse to go. I do not care.

Another thing, as I continue my screed....

... the library has been of minimal use to me where Leonard Pennario is concerned. None of the books I am looking for is ever there. And, you know what, when you are researching a book, this is a problem.

"Well, you can find anything you want on line." That is what people love to tell you! But it is not true. Plus, you cannot just go around buying all these books when you are researching something. It adds up.

Needless to say our loser library also does not belong to any programs that would let you do electronic research free and access old magazine and newspaper articles. Other cities' libraries have programs that let you do that. Ours naturally does not. So I am just stuck spending all this money. I have spent thousands of dollars on line getting my hands on this or that.

Isn't one mission of the library to assist researchers? Apparently not.

Fie on the library!

It does not care what happens to me.

So I do not care what happens to it!

Bum among the books

Another day, another story about the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library!

Yesterday near the entrance to the Children's Department I was hit up by a panhandler. It was this woman who was waving a cell phone and saying it didn't work and she needed change for a dollar. That was what I understood her to say anyway. Change for a dollar is a reasonable request and I always have a million coins.

But when I looked in my wallet I had only a quarter there. The rest of the coins must have fallen to the bottom of my purse. They do that sometimes.

"Do you have a dollar bill?" the woman asked. "That would work."

That was when I realized she was not looking for change for a dollar. She was looking for a dollar.

I said, "Oh, I'm sorry, I don't."

Then I walked away briskly.

This is what we are coming to now, panhandlers in the library. This is what happens when you've got a cafe sitting right there in the middle of everything and noise everywhere and no order.

Notice, too, that every loser in the world has a cell phone? Or, even more often, an iPhone. When I got my iPhone it was this big luxury I was not sure I should shell out for. Now I see every bum on the street has one. To be honest this is starting to bother me.

From the panhandler I proceeded to the music department. I like to go to the section where they have books on pianists and conductors. I like to look in them for references to Leonard Pennario. There never are any! I sneer at these books and put them back on the shelves and that can be very relaxing in the middle of a hectic day.

Even in the music department, though, I could not relax. That was because there was this noise coming from a distance away. It was a kind of loud, snoring noise. Almost like a machine, though I could not think what machine it could be.

Finally when I was going to leave, I walked around the shelf and in the direction of this noise. I had to see where it was coming from.

And what it was, it was coming from a human being. I never got a good look at the actual person because I did not want to stare or get too involved. But all I could picture was Howard's cousin Ron Moss.

Incredibly, a library staffer had approached the offender and was doing something to shush him.

"You're making too much noise," he said.

Naturally some do-gooder woman then reprimands the staffer. "He can't help it," she tried telling him.

The staffer, happily, mouths back to her. "Yes, he can," he said. "He doesn't realize he's doing it but sometimes if you can call his attention to it he can stop for a little while."

I love this staffer! I cannot believe anyone but me cares about noise in the library.

My sister does not care. We got into an argument about that at Easter. She comes in with her kids from East Aurora. It is quiet in East Aurora and they do not live with boom cars and swear words and other annoyances like the ones we have in Buffalo. So the annoyances are fun and exotic for them and when they come in to the Buffalo library they enjoy it the way they enjoy going to the zoo.

"I like that it's so busy," she says.

Fine, you can have that panhandler to work the sidewalk in front of your quaint Vidler's General Store.

We can put that snoring man in the East Aurora library.

Then you can repeat 100 times: "This is cute. I like this."

C'mon, how about it?

Another fine mess

Buffalo is going to hell in a handbasket and in the past few days we have had three buildings closed temporarily because of threats. First the Ellicott Square Building closed and then City Hall was closed.

And then, zut alors, the library was evacuated! That is our Buffalo and Erie County Central Library pictured above. A flattering picture I might add.

I did not see the library evacuation reported by any news outlet but the reason I know about it, I was there. I had this book on Jascha Heifetz that I had to take back. That is this book by Ayke Agus, a violin student from Indonesia who was close friends with Heifetz in the last years of his life. She wrote this memoir I find moving in some ways because I draw parallels with my situation with Leonard Pennario. Here is something funny, Ayke Agus went to Daemen College. She was from here.

One goofy thing, though, Ayke Agus writes that she and Heifetz were not naming any names. Ha, ha!

Pennario named names, I will tell you that right now!

That is one reason why I am taking so long to write this book.

Anyway, I had this book out once before and then I went and got it out again so now here I was with no way to return it because our stupid library was closed because of a threat. I was standing there thinking, something is happening to our sense of public order, you know? I never remember things like this happening.

On Facebook I wrote it was like Northern Ireland but that was a mistake. My Irish Facebook friends started weighing in saying it was not like Northern Ireland, there had been no bomb scares in Northern Ireland since 1994, and besides in Northern Ireland the bombs were real, not fake, etc. etc. etc. All Irish people want to do is talk about Ireland. They are like me with Leonard Pennario. How about that Liszt? Let's play it again.

So I will not say it is like Northern Ireland. I will just say it was weird.

All the workers were standing around outside talking on their cell phones and drinking coffee and behaving the way we used to in school when there was a fire drill. No hurry to get back in.

Our escalating emergencies.

My escalating fines!