Saving Time with Audiobooks

Sam Simas is a Technology Assistant at the Morrill Memorial Library this winter and spring. Read Sam's column in the October 12, 2017 issue of the Norwood Transcript and Bulletin.

I might be the only person neurotic enough to worry that I will die without having read enough books. Some books, like Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia or Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight (no offense?), will probably not create an existential void if I never crack them open. But others contain stories and worlds so well wrought that they could change my life, and perhaps make me even more neurotic (i.e., What if the last book I read was the best one and I’ll never read anything better?). In order to cram as much story as I can into my life, I’ve identified areas that produce stress, like a commute around the Boston area or listening to the news, and have replaced them or supplemented them with audiobooks.

The Word for Potatoes

Sam Simas is a Technology Assistant at the Morrill Memorial Library this winter and spring. Read Sam's column in the June 22, 2017 issue of the Norwood Transcript and Bulletin.

Much of my family history has been washed away on the river behind the soap mills in Rhode Island.  That is where my grandparents worked, lived, and abandoned speaking Portuguese for English, and where they hoped that their children would learn English, too, but with a Rhode Island accent that misplaced “r’s”.  They hoped that their children would learn math from strict nuns-turned-schoolteachers; that their children would one day have jobs better than their own.  What my great grandparents had hoped for when they left the Azores was something better, but not for them.

The Creative Potential of Freckles

Sam Simas is a Technology Assistant at the Morrill Memorial Library this winter and spring. Read Sam's column in the March 16, 2017 issue of the Norwood Transcript and Bulletin.

As a child, when I still drank grape-flavored juice-boxes and stared into the sky, my friend Emily sat with me at a splintered picnic table under Camp Y--’s pavilion and taught me that my freckles had creative potential; that I could use pens or permanent markers or lip-stick and do what she did: connect one dot to the other, make a diamond, or a sailboat, or a horse (she had a lot of freckles).  But my freckles have always been too linear; I could come up with a line, or at best a slanting Orien’s Belt.  Otherwise, I let myself become dejected by the inferior quantity of my skin abnormalities.  For this, I need someone to blame, and so I blamed the sun.

            In defiance of my mother and father, I abandoned all SPF and counted the hours of direct sunlight I could catch on my arms.  Sometimes, in school, I would sit in the window and roll my sleeves back, hoping for a freckle or two.  This, as you may imagine, did not work.  After many years of bright pink sunburn at Camp Y--, no more freckles had appeared on my arms, and I stopped trying to keep up with Emily and her horse-shaped freckle constellations.

I’d learned a lot from trying to fry my skin, more perhaps than a kid should have known; that the sun’s rays were once measured with a Campbell-Stokes sunshine recorder (think of a magnifying glass for frying ants, but adult-sized), and fascination with the power of weather lead to me to explore other weather phenomena: tornadoes, floods, earthquakes, volcanoes, etc. 

Rhode Island: Not Just Family Guy

Sam Simas is a Technology Assistant at the Morrill Memorial Library this winter and spring. Read Sam's column in the September 1, 2016 issue of the Norwood Transcript and Bulletin.

I give directions by referencing where things used-to-be; I drink cabinets from Newport Creamery, and I drank coffee milk and Del’s Lemonade growing up (I still do, but that’s our secret).  And like most people believe themselves to be, I am a questionably qualified driver--although I’ve been told Massachusetts-people (Massachusettites?  Massachusettans?  You all really need to work on that...) don’t agree. I’m used to telling people, “No, Quahog is not an actual town,” when I am asked about the television show Family Guy.  I may be a stereotypical Rhode Islander.

Player Piano

Sam Simas is a Technology Assistant at the Morrill Memorial Library this winter and spring. Read Sam's column in the May 5, 2016 issue of the Norwood Transcript and Bulletin.

           Alice cleans up when people move, or leave, or need to cut the clutter of their never-organized closets.  And she finds, between the discarded lamps, yellow curtains, creaking bed frames, rusted bicycles, and cracked tile floors, the remnants of family holidays, birthdays, and many, many, abandoned pianos.

Beyond My Job Description

Samuel Simas is the technology assistant at the Morrill Memorial library; he is a graduate student at the University of Rhode Island’s Graduate School of Library and Information Studies. Read Sam's column in the April 7, 2016 issue of the Norwood Transcript and Bulletin.

When I worked at the Washanuck Library there was a wasp-nest humming in its eaves; a football sized wasp-nest that discharged angry bullets (or were they wasps?), which, if they could have spoken, would have said, “Stay away from our hive.”

I carried overdue books, a backpack, and a water-bottle up to the front door where I didn’t notice the yellow fiend, dart side pointed skyward, who had positioned itself on the door-handle.  The eaves weren’t enough; the hive wanted the whole building, the books and their vanilla scented pages, the crisp air-conditioning, the new computers and DVDs.  I imagined the queen sitting in her glob of honey, rubbing her prickly feelers, humming,