Day: January 29, 2011

I’m paying more attention to library architecture – Cobleskill, Granville, Edgartown, and the distinctive beauty of the Carnegie Libraries come to mind. A lot of libraries are expanding or trying to expand and their communities are scrambling to come up with money to help them. The Edgartown Library, like the others I’ve seen, is bustling, vital and much loved. Heading back towards the farm Sunday morning, and it will be a fairly long drive to get home. It’s time to get back to life. Gallery 99 art show is just two weeks away and I might be called to jury duty on Monday People ask me if I miss the dogs. Not really. I love them and love seeing them, but I also love traveling around with Maria and being able to focus on the new things I am seeing and the people I am meeting.

They are doing fine without us. I’ve ever had a dog who suffered from “separation anxiety”, and I’d like to keep it that way. They don’t need it and neither do it.

The Library Tour  drew a packed house everywhere we went (except for Providence just after the big storm). Nearly 1,000 came out to meet me and Maria this week and to talk with us about books, reading, and the importance of libraries in our lives. How lucky I was to be able to go to these libraries, and talk to so many people.

I’ll wrote more about it in the next few days. Going home tomorrow, Sunday, back to the world, possibly to jury duty for a few days. It was so wonderful to do this with Maria and to have a life I really wanted to share with people. I hope we made some noise for libraries, and focused some attention on their plight. More than ever, I could see what libraries mean to people, and to me. I’m tired now, so enough. More later. Thanks for following me along.  I have more to say abou it.

Powerful to be back on the Vineyard, after a long absence. My friend Jan Pogue is giving me a series of great tours. Going to the Edgartown Library at 2 p.m. for the last appearance of Library Book Tour, one of the great experiences of my writing life. A beautiful place to be giving a talk.

It took awhile, but I found the old ma and pa store that my grandparents ran in North Providence. Very different, inside and out. Quite a jolt to stand there.

My grandmother Minnie and my grandfather Jacob came to America from Russia after the turn of the century and worked just about every day of their lives selling groceries and candy to their then-immigrant neighborhood. My grandmother died many years ago, and she and I loved one another dearly. She often sat me down and warned me not to marry outside of my faith, then Jewish.

Gentile women, she would tell me – she called them “shicksas” did not generally clean or cook much, so I needed to find a Jewish wife who was domestic and who would take care of me. Well…. Standing in front of her shop, and then at the door of her tenement down the road, I introduced her to Maria, who was in the car. And told her I had been divorced and then remarried.

I often ran away from home, and invariably ended up at my grandmother’s apartment, getting soup and candy and shelter.

“I did marry a gentile woman,” I said, “and you were right, at least about her. She does not clean or cook. But I do and I am very happy and that is a lot more important, really.” I felt her presence in that tiny shop, where she spent a half century of her life and worked so hard. I could feel her smile and her approval. She would have loved Maria.

In Scituate Mass, Library Susan Frankel offers a gracious introduction to me and to my work. We had a great crowd, and a good conversation. This morning, we got up before dawn and headed to the Vineyard Ferry in Wood’s Hole, Mass. The computer was down for a couple of days and back up now. Staying with my friend Jan Pogue, who worked with me on some newspapers. She invited me to the Edgartown Library, where I will be at 2 p.m. Great to see her again, and to watch Jan and Maria yak about art. The circle keeps turning.