Rivkah's Rambles

In the Sunday New York Times a couple of weeks ago, who knows why, Abe read an obituary to me. It was for Richard Pratt Prunty and was such a loving tribute from his children that I saved it. Obviously Mr. Prunty was a remarkable ("erudite, sesquipedalian, ebullient, chaetophorous, neo-luddite bibliophile...") man who loved books and words. Of course I never had the opportunity to meet him, but thanks to Tim Berners-Lee, creativity and daily delivery of the New York Times, I too had the opportunity to celebrate Mr. Prunty's life.

It's a convergence like this that gives me hope for libraries, dictionaries, children and the world.

In Mr. Prunty's honor I think all of us should look up a word we don't quite understand, and celebrate curiosity and the public library.

Thank you Prunty children, for sharing your father with all of us.

She was born on January 19, 2000 and we adopted her when she was 18 months old. We knew that racing was not her strong suit because she raced a total of 4 times, coming in last or almost last each time. It wasn't until a few months later that I found the day of her birth on some papers and realized that January 19 is Edgar Allan Poe's birthday. Had we known, we might have stuck her with the name Annabelle Lee. Lacking this information we named her Cleo because Abe didn't like my first choice, Lizzie, short for Miss Elizabeth Bennet, one of my favorite characters in literature. He said the name reminded him of Lizzie Borden and the connotation was just too unpleasant. We thought of Cleo because her eyes were lined in black like Cleopatra's. I know greyhounds are a very special breed but Cleo really was extraordinary. She actually learned to walk off leash because she had no prey drive and chasing small creatures was not to her taste (pun intended). She actually learned things like "shake a paw" (taught by our friend Eva), to sit like a sphinx, to bark when she was hungry (and that was about the only time she did), and to poop and pee on command. She was mellow, perfect and she was my girl.

We still don't know what happened, but in the early evening of April 22 she vomited and started showing signs of distress. By noon the next day she was dead, literally minutes before the vet was going to do exploratory surgery. Remember that line from the movie "Fried Green Tomatoes?" Cicely Tyson says, "...a lady always knows when to leave. " That's how Cleo was. She just went. The hardest thing for me was not being with her when it happened. I literally arrived at the vet's office 5 minutes too late.

So there it is. Our beautiful pooch came in with Edgar Allan Poe and departed with William Shakespeare. Hard as it still is to think about, there's a lovely literary symmetry to it all, don't you think? And I'm so glad I took her to see Henry V at Shakespeare in the Park last summer. She got to hear Henry shout, "I see you stand like greyhounds in the slips, straining upon the start. The game's afoot."

So, prey drive or not, I hope she's curled up next to Poe and Shakespeare listening to them debate their literary styles, and once in awhile thinking of me.

I had the good fortune to speak to a fantastic group of librarians at a great conference, "From City Center to the Exurbs: Trends in Public Library Realities." I think of it as the "Bernie Conference" because Bernard Vavrek is the brains behind it. It's great fun and it was a pleasure to hear George Needham, Denise Davis (Director of Research and Statistics for ALA), Andrea Michaels, and others. I had fun talking about all the things I believe about partnerships and collaborations, but my true "aha" moment came at the Milwaukee airport on the trip home.

Being a green tea junkie, and having forgotten to take any with me, I hightailed it to Starbucks when my flight landed at MKE to grab a grande. I ended up talking with Robert who was there cleaning around the Starbucks and flirting with the two young women wearing SBUX aprons. Don't know how it happened, but WHAT happened was one of those conversations with someone whom you realize, in a better world, would be a VP in a Fortune 500 company, a guru of some sort, or maybe even a librarian.

Robert is 19 and just that day found out his girlfriend is pregnant. Being a mom, I did my "you have to go to school" lecture. We talked about how hard that will be and how important, and he said he knew he needed to do it because we "are becoming a third world country." Since I use those very words all the time, I felt a little like Will Smith seeing the butterfly tattoo on the woman's neck in "I am Legend." Robert made me wish I had the kind of money that would allow me to say, "I'm going to cover your costs for school and living for six months. As long as you do well, more will be available. Go forth and build the future so we all have hope. We owe it to our past and our future to help you succeed."

While it breaks my heart to think that a 19-year-old worries about our civilization, it also gives me hope. The question is, what can we do about it?