On the Dreams of a Circulation Page

06/01/2008 6:35 AM – 8:18 AM

I had a dream this morning as I was waking up. It was one of those dreams that get sandwiched in-between first awakening and actually getting out of bed. What was unusual about it was that it was a dream about work. Not my place of work, but the actual work itself.

In cop shows, there is a difference between a character driven show and a case driven show, thought now they mix ‘em up quite a bit. The case driven shows, “Law and Order” tends to be this type, are often referred to as “procedurals,” as they try to follow the actual procedures that cops would in real life. My dream was a “library procedural,” rather boring, in fact, but the case was interesting and the observations that a free-roaming viewer might take from it could be informative.

Part of my job is to get people library cards. On an average day, I can process anywhere between one card application and a dozen of them. I usually deny about as many. In order to get a library card in Erie County you need two things: proof of signature and proof of residence. The easiest proof is a current New York State driver’s license or non-driver’s ID. Other than that, we can use quite a few different things, but they have to be things recognized by the library system as valid proof. If you’ve got a driver’s license with an old address and no other proof of address, you’re out of luck (if you don’t tell us it’s an old address, you can still get one, but you know, you’re a liar). We follow the rules fairly strictly. The amount of people that come in every day trying to cheat the library is mind-numbing. Soul-numbing too. And that’s what the dream was about in a way. A lady came in and wanted to get a library card. Her address: the lighthouse at the base of one of the legs of the Peace Bridge. As far as I know, there is no lighthouse at the base of the Peace Bridge, but that had to be one of the coolest addresses that would ever come across the desk. In my dream, my mind drifted to what that would be like to live there, but surprisingly, came back to the problem with processing her application. While her actual residence was in Erie County, her mail could not, for some reasons of international neutrality that I don’t think exist in non-dream life, be processed by the post-office in Erie County and was instead handled by one of the counties south of us. There was a special run that had to be taken to get her mail to her and as a result, even though she had mail stating her address as being in Erie, it was C/O of another county. I could not legally issue her a card.

Now, if that happened in real life, I would call a supervisor over who would probably, with a case that bizarre, call in the department supervisor who would tell me to go ahead and process it and issue her a card, but in the dream, there was no supervisor to go to. In addition, she was prickly. In fact, she was nearly the Platonic ideal of what someone who lived in a lighthouse under a bridge should be: she was about fifty, a little short, wore no make-up and had long graying hair that was pulled back into a braided pony-tail. She was thin and muscular and had that tough, weathered skin that speaks of a life spent out-of-doors. Outside of my job, I’d think was pretty damn cool and hot in a middle-age lady sort-of way, but she was flinty and, quite reasonably, didn’t see why she couldn’t get a library card. I however, couldn’t do it. It’s not that she didn’t have proof, but that she didn’t have the right proof.

Once again, there are very good reasons why we need to have the right proof. When you can't check out a book to a tearful kid that has a report due tomorrow but six dollars and three cents in fines, then the very next patron you get is someone who knows the system and has five different library cards from five different branches with five slightly different birthdays and five slightly different social security numbers and has managed to accumulate over a thousand dollars worth of unreturned/declared lost DVD fines on those five cards and then becomes irate and starts yelling at you for refusing to issue them a sixth card with a sixth slightly different birthday and social security number, you begin to understand the importance of those asinine rules. You really begin to appreciate them when you see this type of person once a month and similar patrons of a lesser degree (only one or two cards and only a hundred or so dollars in unreturned items), two or three times a day. And then when a six-year-old comes in with a parent to get a card and you have to refuse them because when she was four weeks old, the little girl apparently got out "Tantric Sex Magic," "Bloody X-Mas Part 4," "Gangsta Bitches," "Understanding God's Seven-Fold Call for Your Life," and "A Guide to Government Small Business Loans," and then never returned them, then you wish that there were more rules.

But the lighthouse lady had none of these flags and I still couldn’t issue her a card. It’s an extreme case and I woke up not long after she started getting really angry with me, but not before I felt that old familiar contempt creeping into my tone when I responded to her. And she was someone that would love libraries: she would love the thousands and thousands of books on thousands and thousands of different topics, and she would love the thousands of CD's with Mozart and Son House and Led Zeppelin, and Deerhoof, and she would love the hundreds of movies with Truffaut and Bergman and Hitchcock and Apatow. She would know it. She would know what was meant by it. She would understand it in her guts. I know she would have loved it.

I suppose I still love libraries too. There’s too much in them that I desire for me not to love them. I’d already spent too much time in them long before I ever started working in one for me to ever shake loose of them. And I’m a good Page: I’m friendly to those patrons that want me to be friendly, businesslike to those that are there only for business, mostly able to put on an unperturbed air in the face of the numerous crazies, bums and bullies that frequent this "Free For All." But I’m glad that it will be over soon.

I read recently that if a marriage is solid, the most common response to the question, “where do you go for peace?” was “home.” If a marriage was on shaky ground, “home” was one of the least common responses. If you had asked me where I went for peace when I was twelve, “the library” would have been in my Top 5. Now, as soon as they tell us that we can turn off our computers and go home, I grab my back-pack, put on my headphones and set out without a backward glance, happy not to be wondering if this next patron is going to be one that makes my hands shake.