Falling Between the Cracks

Librarian April Cushing is head of Adult and Information Services at the Morrill Memorial Library. Read her column published in the March 19, 2020 issue of the Norwood Transcript & Bulletin.

I think I’m officially losing it. In this case, “it” refers to pretty much anything of importance I lay hands on. My mother called it carelessness. It’s not a recent affliction with me, but it may be getting worse. It’s definitely getting more frustrating. After my most recent episode, I realize I need to take action.

I come from a long line of losers. My forebears (by marriage) lost waterfront property on the coast of Maine by neglecting to pay the taxes. My immediate loved ones have misplaced everything from wallets to watches, cell phones to shoes, coats to cameras (remember them?). I managed to lose one of my few valuable pieces of jewelry—a single sapphire earring--at my daughter’s wedding in England last year. I beat myself up over that one for days.

Not long ago I got a call from a recycling company in Ohio. Had I left a laptop on an Amtrak train to DC last summer? No, but the daughter to whom I’d lent it had, I discovered. I couldn’t even be mad at her because it’s exactly the sort of thing I’d do. My new friend at the recycling company reset the password and mailed it back to her in Brooklyn, gratis.

A couple months ago I lost my keys. I lent them to one of my kids who borrowed my car and did, in fact, return them. Moments later I sped off to the Cape for the weekend in my trusty, keyless-entry Prius. When I pulled into the Harwich Stop & Shop and tried to lock the car containing my priceless (to me) pup, the key fob was nowhere to be found. I checked pockets, purse, on the seat, under the seat, around the seat. Nothing. But since I was able to restart the car by simply pushing the ignition switch, I wasn’t too worried. The key, with its proximity sensor, had to be nearby. When I got to the house I turned off the car, then immediately tried powering it back up. Upon hearing it purr to life I unpacked the Prius and figured I’d find the key in the light of day.

Finding a Treasure Trove

Nancy Ling is the Outreach Librarian at the Morrill Memorial Library in Norwood, Massachusetts.  Read Nancy’s column in the March 12, 2020 issue of the Transcript and Bulletin.

When someone you love is suddenly gone from your life, there are obvious things that you will miss—their captivating smile, their warm embrace, that goofy joke they told at every family gathering.

Not surprisingly there are other heartaches that we cannot anticipate or measure—things we never imagined that we would long for after a loved one passes away. This was the case with my father. This April it will have been two years since he departed and I am shocked at how quickly we have forgotten some of his character traits and idiosyncrasies. For a while, I couldn’t find any recordings of his voice, and I was distraught. Yes, I remembered exactly how he would say “Hello Nana-Banana” when he gave me a hug, but I wanted to remember more, each intonation. Thankfully, several friends and family members found recordings on their phones that they shared with me, one even highlighted his laughter which was a treasure to hear.

The Printers' Daughter

Charlotte Canelli is the library director of the Morrill Memorial Library in Norwood, Massachusetts. Read Charlotte's column in the March 5, 2020 edition of the Transcript &Bulletin.

This past week, I was yanking some memento out of the bottom of a long-forgotten box, when a small metal plate slipped out of a booklet. It was a three by one-and-one-half inch engraved plate - a metal negative of a photo of my mother. I remembered the photograph well. It accompanied an article in a printed newspaper or newsletter published over a half-century ago. 

In the early 1960s, Mrs. Carolyn Fitzgerald had been elected to the office of President of the Women's Auxiliary to the Typographical Union in Oakland, California. I flipped the metal right to left and revealed an image of a beautiful, perfectly coiffed young mother in her thirties. Flipping it again, of the metal plate exposed the negative image of the same photo.

That day, I was reminded of the newspaper printing business that defined my childhood. In 1959, my soon-to-be stepfather left his job as a typesetter at the Worcester Telegram and Evening Gazette. He and his brother, Bill Fitzgerald, had heard there were plenty of printing opportunities, particularly typesetting, in the newspaper industry in the San Francisco Bay Area.  Like pioneers, they were the advance team, moving to the west coast, getting decent-paying union jobs, and setting up apartments to await their families. My mother, my brother, and I made the transatlantic journey from Boston to San Francisco on TWA and settled into that unique college town called Berkeley.

Dispatches in Sandpaper: Send 20-Grit

Liz Reed is an Adult and Information Services Librarian at the Morrill Memorial Library in Norwood, Massachusetts. Read Liz’s column in the February 27, 2020 issue of the Transcript and Bulletin.

                When you buy a fixer-upper house, sooner or later you need to start fixing it up before it can feel like home. And if you’re fixing the place up on a shoestring budget, you find creative solutions and invest sweat equity wherever possible. You start by checking the low-hanging fruit off the punch list, tasks like spackling mysterious holes in the original window frames, replacing lightbulbs, and gingerly tucking the porch door screen back into its frame with a butter knife.

                Next you move onto jobs that are a bit more disruptive and take more time and resources, but that go a long way towards improving the look of the house. Painting is a great thing to do at this phase. Taping window frames and baseboards is a time consuming precursor to painting, but is very much worth it if the color of your paint is significantly different than the wood trim, if you’re trying to preserve the natural-wood look of that trim, or if you’re painting an accent wall.

Tomorrow’s Treasures

Brian DeFelice is the Information Technology Librarian at the Morrill Memorial Library in Norwood, MA and Anthony DeFelice Jr. is a retired U.S. Marine, antiques dealer, and accordion player in Plymouth, MA

My father recalls the time he was in the middle of an intense bidding war with another antique dealer over an item. He was in an auction house in Acushnet, Massachusetts and was sitting in the way back of the spacious barn that had been converted into an antique auction house. He was smoking a cigarette with the other smokers (it was the early 90s that was allowed back then!). Though he could not recall what the item he was bidding on was, he remembers he knew he wanted it for his antique store, but was being constantly outbid by another dealer who was in the front row of the auction house.

Meanwhile, I was in my usual stomping ground: the kitchen area, watching “Big Bill'' the auctioneer moderate the bidding war between my dad and the other bidder. I loved going to antique auctions with my dad because the people at the auction house treated me like a prince. Everyone was really nice and they would let me play with some of the (less valuable) antique toys, and Big Bill would let me have a cheeseburger on the house. To this day, my mom and I still talk about how good those cheeseburgers were. Big Bill was a presence. He was loud and totally in charge of the auction that night. I remember that for less valuable items, he would start the bid at $1 and would say “let’s start this bid at a bawk bawk bawk bawk” and start imitating and clucking like a chicken. I was seven at the time, and this silliness NEVER got old with me.

Tales from the Swamp

Charlotte Canelli is the library director of the Morrill Memorial Library in Norwood, Massachusetts. Read Charlotte's column in the February 13, 2020 edition of the Transcript & Bulletin.

           If you study a map of Florida, you'll see that most of the southern tip is a remote green wilderness with few roads or cities. Except for that significant development of cities and towns along both of Florida's southern coasts, there are just a few east-to-west highways that connect Boca Raton on the Atlantic to Naples on the Gulf. One of them, Highway 41, starts in a downtown neighborhood in Miami and veers north at Everglades City, bypassing Marco Island, skirts the Gulf Coast cities of western Florida, and then heads north to Michigan. This Tamiami Trail passes east from Miami to the west and north to Tampa. Along the Everglades, it is known as Alligator Alley, with one lane in each direction. Alligators, commonly seen in the waters near the highway, share this land along with hundreds of other animal and bird species.

           A more well-known highway, Interstate 75, skirts the northern parts of the Florida everglades and Big Cypress National Preserve. It travels through Fakahatchee Strand State Preserve before it, too, turns north through western Florida, before it reaches West Virginia forests and eventually crosses the land between the Great Lakes and ends at the Canadian border.
           Most travelers take either of these two routes across the vast glades of Florida. The hardier traveler, however, travels southwest from Homestead, passing through Everglades National Park along State Highway 9336 and deep into the swamp at the southernmost tip.  Those riskier adventure-seekers can then go to the ghost town of Flamingo, or travel along the 99-mile Everglades Wilderness Waterway. This watery land is also known as the Marjory Stoneman Douglas Wilderness. It is only accessed by kayak, canoe, and shallow-draft powerboats through a system of interconnected creeks, rivers, bays, and lakes. It is recommended that boaters relying on paddles plan eight days to travel – one of the passes is navigable only at high tide.
           The Florida Everglades was originally a 14,000-square mile expanse. Through a series of diversions, the Everglades has shrunk to 4,000 square miles. The 1.5 million acres known as Everglades National Park protects the 20% of the original area.
            While most of the America's national parks are established to preserve the beautiful and unique geography of the United States (such as Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon, Death Valley) the Everglades National Park was created to protect a fragile ecosystem. Lake Okeechobee to the north feeds a river that flows through the glades into Florida Bay. I had always envisioned the Everglades as a dark and murky, wet and wild place much like a rain forest. Instead, I have learned it is a flowing river and provides a perfect habitat for the American crocodile and other reptiles such as alligators and snakes, the Florida panther, the West Indian manatee, 350 species of birds and hundreds of types of fish.
           In 1882 the first plans to drain these Florida wetlands began as somewhat well-intentioned uses for agricultural and residential development. At that time, Miami was merely an eastern outpost. Once a land inhabited by the Tequesta – a Native American tribe that occupied this area along the southeastern Atlantic coast – missionaries and colonists were attracted to the land and its long growing season.  When railroad tycoon Henry Flagler connected the Florida East Coast Railway to Miami, the population of the town was a bit over 300. After World War II, Miami's population soared to nearly 500,000, similar to what it is today. However, the northern and southern metropolis of Miami boasts over 6 million residents, the seventh-largest in the United States.
           Fortunately for Florida, environmentalists intervened well before this population boom to protect the vanishing Everglades. The foremost of those was Marjory Stoneman Douglas.
           Many of us are familiar with the name Marjory Stoneham Douglas. On Valentine's Day two years ago, a deranged gunman killed 17 children and adults at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. That school had opened on Douglas' 100th birthday in 1990. An elementary school in Miami-Dade County is also named after her, along with a municipal building, and a 15-minute orchestra piece, Voice of the Everglades. But, there is so much more to attribute to Douglas, including saving the Everglades.
           Marjory Stoneman Douglas has roots in New England that I never knew until my Everglades reading began. While she was born in 1890 in Minneapolis, after the divorce of her parents at age six she moved to her mother's family home in nearby Taunton, Massachusetts. At the age of 17, she won a Boston Herald prize for a short story. A stellar reader, writer and student, she left home for Wellesley College at the age of eighteen and graduated in 1912.
            Several years later, after the death of her mother, (and a failed marriage to a scoundrel named Kenneth Douglas) she moved to Florida. There she began writing for a newspaper that her father published – later to be named the Miami Herald. It was through her journalistic voice that Marjory began changing the history of Florida.
           Her early activism included women's suffrage and public health. Her efforts turned to environmentalism early in the 1920s when she was in her thirties when she joined the board of the Everglades Tropical National Park Committee. In 1947, she wrote The Everglades: River of Grass, the essential book written about the Everglades.
           The story of Florida, the terrible mismanagement of natural resources, the Big Sugar pollution of Lake Okeechobee, the rampant abuse of the land, and the corruption of politicians, is a larger story than this column can begin to describe. Yet, the work of Marjory Stoneham Douglas has saved a portion of the Florida Everglades for generations to enjoy.    
           If you are interested in learning about this magical wilderness and its rescue, read The Swamp: The Everglades, Florida, and the Politics of Paradise (2007) by Time correspondent Michael Grunwald.  In another great book, Liquid Land: A Journey through the Florida Everglades (2004), author Ted Levin describes his many journeys through the Everglades, with profiles of those who attempted to coerce or steal the Everglades for development - and those who have worked to win it back.
           If you want a serious, and sometimes hilarious, account, read Hodding Carter's Stolen Water: Saving the Everglades from Its Friends, Foes and Florida (2005). It's a great way to begin an education into the story of Florida and the abuse of its land, particularly the Everglades wilderness.
           Jack E. Davis' biography of Marjory Stoneman Douglas, An Everglades Providence (2009), is a 700-page tome dedicated to the virtues and actions of this amazing woman. In 1993, five years before her death at age 108, Marjory was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor granted by the United States. The citation read "Grateful Americans honor the Grandmother of the Glades by following her splendid example in safeguarding America's beauty and splendor for generations to come."

            A lovely children's picture book biography will be published this September. Marjory Saves the Everglades will be an important book to share with every young environmentalist. As Marjory and other preservationists cry, "The Everglades is a test. If we pass, we get to keep the planet."

           

New Year, New Me?

In my last article, I claimed I avoid New Year’s resolutions like the plague. Now that we’re a month into 2020, I have changed my tune.  My motto has also been “All things in moderation” and I think I can apply that to the “new year, new me” spirit of January. I’ve correctly observed I’ll never be the type to make a massive change on January 1st but I could be the sort of person who makes small changes which add up to a sizable difference over the year.

Instead of “resolution,” I choose to use the term “modification.” This term is less radical and scary than resolution and thus, makes my goals feel more attainable. I’m not resolving to undertake a new lifestyle, I’m just making a few adjustments to the one I already have. I also try to stay away from trends when considering little changes at the start of the year. It seems like the Internet is always ready to champion the latest health or diet fads along with the best way to organize your time, be happier, less stressed, a more effective parent, a better employee, etc. The self-help industry is booming and librarians certainly see this reflected in the demand for books on this topic. Librarians are constantly fielding requests for books on how to improve your life and updating our self-help collection with new titles.

My Journey to Not Motherhood

Lydia Sampson is the Assistant Director/Technical Services Librarian at the Morrill Memorial Library in Norwood, Massachusetts. Read her column in the January 30, 2020 issue of the Transcript & Bulletin.

The doctor slid a piece of paper across the table showing a line graph that looked like it represented a stock market crash-  a jagged line rising, peaking, falling, then plummeting. The line represented my fertility. She explained the graph with facts, numbers and percentages, but the image of that nose-diving line got the point across. The doctor explained that if I did everything right- took hormones, tracked my ovulation, timed my pregnancy attempts carefully- I’d still only have a 5% chance of getting pregnant, and even if I did, there’d be a 60% chance of miscarriage.

Preliminary tests showed nothing physically wrong with me or my husband. The doctor was essentially telling me I couldn’t have kids because I was just too old. I quickly learned that telling people about the prognosis only made me feel worse. Suddenly everyone had encouraging words about women bearing children late in life. Everyone knew somebody in their mid-forties who had a healthy baby, or someone diagnosed as infertile who wasn’t after all, or a couple who began the process of adoption only to get pregnant soon after. Good for all of those people, I thought, but what about the women who received similar news to mine, and did not go on to have a “miracle” child? I could not count on being one to defy the odds.

“IF:” Intermittent Fasting… The Last Best Thing

Charlotte Canelli is the library director of the Morrill Memorial Library in Norwood, Massachusetts. Read Charlotte's column in the January 23, 2020 edition of the Transcript & Bulletin.

I first heard about IF in the workplace. A colleague had dropped a significant amount of weight in less than a year, and I was intrigued. When this colleague told me about IF, I was dubious, but, results speak for themselves. Still, I hesitated. Going hours without eating… could I do that? I was just embarking upon a short trip to Sandwich (ha, ha) in September of this year, and while there I visited the Sandwich Library (of course). As I was entering, I saw that they were having an annual book sale. For some reason, the thought went through my mind, “If Intermittent Fasting (IF) is for me, I will find a book for $1.00 on it.” Impossible, right? Not so. I discovered The FastDiet (updated in 2015) by Dr. Michael Mosely and Mimi Spencer.

Making Room

Kirstie David is a Literacy and Outreach Librarian at the Morrill Memorial Library in Norwood, MA. Look for her article in the January 9, 2020 edition of the Transcript & Bulletin.

My husband and I are three-time greyhound adopters, and we said a sad farewell to our last hound in March. Lahni was nearly thirteen years old, and was the hardest luck case in our bunch. She had been adopted out, then returned to the agency about nine months later. Upon inquiring why, we learned she hadn’t done well being on her own during the day. Once back at the agency she was allowed to roam free in the hall because she wouldn’t tolerate being crated. Lahni had languished for over a year in this state of limbo while other dogs with fewer issues came and went.

We had actually been to this place on several occasions to meet and walk different dogs, following the heartbreaking loss of our first greyhound, Abby. We were determined to hold out on adopting again until we felt the same magic spark we’d experienced with her. Unfortunately, none of the candidates had stood out for us. One day after another failed attempt, we offered to walk Lahni. She wasn’t a consideration for us given her anxiety issues, but she looked like she could use a change of scenery.

The Joy of Cooking Gadgets

Charlotte Canelli is the library director of the Morrill Memorial Library in Norwood, Massachusetts. Read Charlotte's column in the January 9, 2020 edition of the Transcript & Bulletin.


While I received several beloved small kitchen appliances for shower and wedding gifts nearly a half-century ago, most of them were resigned to the graveyard for kitchen gadgets over the years. I abandoned the electric can opener decades ago, along with the electric wok and labor-intensive turn-the-crank ice cream maker. If one of my small appliances was left abandoned in the cabinet above the refrigerator, or to the garage shelf behind the holiday décor, it was out of sight and out of mind. Those items never made the trip on the many moving vans as our family drove or flew to our new home. If it did get packed for the move, it may have stayed packed. Mice and spiders found cozy homes in tangled cords or Teflon coatings, and entire boxes were tossed into dumpsters in eventual cleanouts.

There are, of course, those favorite kitchen gadgets that I adore and use often. In the 1970s, I served my sister-in-law Minute rice for dinner. She was the daughter of Japanese-Hawaiian parents, and she promptly she gifted me with a Panasonic rice cooker that Christmas.  (Rice, after all, is a sacred dish to be cooked properly!) I've cherished that cooker for nearly fifty years, and amazingly, it still works perfectly after hundreds of uses.

An Unconventional Spin on Holiday Films

Lydia Sampson is the Assistant Director/Technical Services Librarian at the Morrill Memorial Library in Norwood, Massachusetts. Read her column in the Jan 2, 2020 issue of the Transcript & Bulletin.

With another Christmas gone by and the New Year approaching I’ve just about finished my annual tradition of binge-watching holiday movies. Ever since childhood I’ve associated the month of December and its corresponding onslaught of decorations, carols and cookies with a television set airing non-stop seasonal programming. As I’ve gotten older, though, my tastes have changed.

Once upon a time we didn’t have Netflix or Hulu or DVRs. Before then we didn’t have DVDs or cable television, or even VHS tapes. During my childhood we had no option but to scour the (print) TV guide that came with the Sunday newspaper and keep track of when Christmas specials would air. I could hardly contain my excitement anticipating the animated How the Grinch Stole Christmas, A Charlie Brown Christmas, and Frosty the Snowman. My absolute favorites, though, came out of the Rankin/Bass stop-motion studio and included Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer (featuring Bumble the abominable snowman) and The Year Without a Santa Claus (featuring the brothers Heat Miser and Snow Miser).

The Women Who Drew My Childhood

Nicole Guerra-Coon is the Assistant Children’s Librarian at the Morrill Memorial Library in Norwood, MA. Look for her column in the December 26, 2019 edition of the Transcript & Bulletin.

When I was about three or four years old, my parents took me to my first movie in a theater - Disney’s “Snow White.” They weren’t sure if I would be able to sit still, or if I would be overwhelmed by the darkness or the sound. But I sat there, completely entranced, for the entire film.  Only when it ended and the lights came up, did I start to sob.  My parents were startled, and as they ushered me out of the theater, they kept reassuring me, “It was just a movie! The witch isn’t real!” But as I sobbed through the parking lot, the adults within earshot burst into laughter as I choked out “I…just...didn’t want it...to end!”

This is a memory that has stayed with me, and I have always thought about it through the lense of storytelling and its universal power.

A Year in Reading

Kate Tigue is the Head of Youth Services at the Morrill Memorial Library. Read her column in the December 12, 2019 edition of the Transcript and Bulletin. 

I’ve never been big on New Year’s resolutions. I find them a little depressing, knowing I’ll likely never keep them.  I don’t know what it is about the word “resolution” but it has such a negative connotation for me that I always avoid them. I prefer to set goals. Having goals sounds way more positive to me than making resolutions. Goals are things you can work toward, resolutions are things you have to keep.

I am a member of GoodReads, a social media centered around books and reading. When I first joined, I primarily used GoodReads as a way to keep track of the books I’ve read and the titles I wanted to read. But several years ago, GoodReads start challenging it users to a yearly reading goal in January of the new year. Participants can set the number of books they wish to finish reading by the end of December and a member’s homepage will track their progress toward their goal. I’ve set a goal every year since this feature was introduced and mostly met them. This year, I was very ambitious and hoped to read 25 books. I might fall a few short of that goal as I’ve only read 22 and December is halfway over!

Florida's Carl Hiaasen

Charlotte Canelli is the library director of the Morrill Memorial Library in Norwood, Massachusetts. Read Charlotte's column in the December 5, 2019 edition of the Transcript & Bulletin.

Carl Hiassen wrote the little book, Assume the Worst (2018), as the "graduation speech you'll never hear." He wrote it to his son, Quinn, upon his commencement from high school that year.  The advice as far as Hiaasen is concerned is meant for anyone. It might be a bit too honest, and perhaps a tad pessimistic, for many of us. Hiaasen argues against some of the favorite adages we hear all the time, like "Live Each Day As If It's Your Last" and "If You Set Your Mind to It, You Can Be Anything You Want to Be."  His conflict with these sentiments? If you lived every day like it was your last, you'd undoubtedly be broke, irrelevant, and possibly in prison. And can you really be the next Willy Mays or Bill Gates? Probably not. Hiassen's adage? "Self-delusion is no virtue."

Hiaasen proclaims that it's more important to "figure out what you're good at and get better at it." Or, more simplistically and realistically, "live each day as if your rent is due tomorrow."