Between Friends News from and About the Friends of Beebe Library Summer 2018

Between Friends News from and about the Friends of Beebe Library Summer 2018

Summer Reading Beebe Library celebrates reading this summer with "Libraries Rock" summer activities and reading raffles;#WakefieldReads (on Twitter) and #Whatsyour4 (http://www.wakefieldreads.org/) This joint Library and public school initiative challenges students to read four books during the summer to keep their skills strong. The Library has many new and popular books available both in book form and digitally from OverDrive and Hoopla. The Beebe website lists over 200 new fiction titles and 89 new nonfiction titles. The Library has been out in the community at Wakefield parks this summer. There was Beebe Pop Up Library in July at the Mapleway Playground in Greenwood. Another pop up will occur on Wednesday, August 22 at the JJ Round Playground on Main Street. Photo: Librarian Karen Stern staffed a Pop Up at the Farmers' Market. What are you reading this summer? WakefieldLibrary.org currently has Summer Beach Reads recommendations! You can find them by following: Home/ Books, Movies & More/Book Buzz/Book Lists. "The Great American Read" is a nationwide program sponsored by PBS, and has been going on all year. The Beebe Library has a display of all the nominated books, for those who would like to read books recommend- ed by Americans throughout the country. The winner will be chosen this fall by all who participated. You can vote too! Check it out at http://www.pbs.org/the-great-american-read/home/

2018 Book Sale Revisited Thanks to all who volunteered at the book sale. Almost 100 people pitched in a few hours or a few days to run book bucket brigades, set up tables, haul, move, sort, organize books, DVDs CDs, LPs, games etc., promote and hang signs. Then, when it was all over, it was time to undo it all and take materials back to storage and start to get ready for the Festival by the Lake. The planning and organizing goes on all year, but we really appreciate everyone who pitches in to make every book sale so successful. Special thanks go to the First Baptist Church for letting us use their facilities for another year.

Plaza Jazz is in Full Swing! Every Thursday, through August 30th, from 6 to 8 p.m., countdown to the weekend with a picnic on the Library plaza to the sounds of world music, jazz, pop, strings, horns… great musicians right here on Main Street. In the event of bad weather, the music moves inside: no cancellations. Click for a schedule continued on the next page Between Friends - Summer 2018 continued

Traveling Poetry Emporium by Julia Story Saturday, June 23 was a little rainy, a little gray—not ideal for a farmer’s market, but the citizens of Wakefield made up for the weather with their kindness, charm, and subjects for poems! The Traveling Poetry Emporium is three mobile poets who write original poems to order on any subject, using our vintage portable typewriters. Cassandra de Alba and I wrote poems to order for at least thirty visitors that day, along with our colleague, GennaRose Nethercott. We had a blast, and along with meeting some really nice people, we also petted some dogs (including Noodle in her fancy 4th of July dress!), got free samples of delicious food, and had a beautiful view of Lake Quannapowitt, all from the comfort of our tent-protected booth (thanks for the tent, Beebe Memorial Library!). One of my favorite requests that day was for a poem about a toddler named Darcy—as her parents informed me, she loves chocolate milk and yellow flowers, and she also appeared to be quite interested in hula hoops. I also wrote poems about what it’s like to begin the journey of retirement and the unexpected surprises that appear along the way, about mermaids for an eight- year-old birthday girl, about joys and trials of caring for an elderly parent, and several for some well-loved moms. Cassandra wrote about some wonderful subjects as well—among them, I heard requests for poems about dinosaurs, dragons, two dogs in love, and potlucks! We look forward to returning to the Wakefield Farmers Market on October 6 and to writing more poems (including some Halloween ones, perhaps?)! Thank you so much to Beebe Memorial Library for inviting us, and the Friends of the Library for sponsoring us! www.travelingpoetryemporium.com

Thoreau’s Annoying Masterpiece By John Breithaupt "July 6. I wish to meet the facts of life – the vital facts, which are the phenomena or actuality the gods meant to show us – face to face, and so I came down here. Life! Who knows what it is, what it does?" Entry in Thoreau’s journal, dated two days after he moved to Walden Pond I know a well-read young woman who hates “Walden”, the masterpiece of Henry Da- vid Thoreau. She says that the book is a bore and that Thoreau himself was a “jerk”. The book that she dislikes is, of course, Thoreau’s account of what he did, saw, felt, and learned during the two years, two months, and two days when he lived in a one- room shanty by the edge of Walden Pond, on a slice of property owned by his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson. The years were 1845 to 1847. I do not share this young woman’s feelings about Thoreau or his book, but I understand why she feels the way she does. Thoreau writes with a degree of conviction that we associate with cranks on street corners who proclaim the imminent end of the world. He tells us that we are wasting our lives in the pursuit of worthless prizes, even though we are only doing what we have to do to earn a living. He says that life is a burden only for those who make it so for themselves. He might have titled his book “I’m OK, You Could Do Better”. He is a scold. But something more fundamental than Thoreau’s manner makes it difficult for us to take him seriously: his belief that nature is an open book in which meanings have been written for us to read. Men have been re- duced to living “lives of quiet desperation”, he said, because they have not learned from the book of nature to be aware of the life-saving truths that are written on their own souls. continued on the next page

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Thoreau's Annoying Masterpiece continued In the years since Thoreau wrote, science has changed our way of thinking about nature. For us, nature is no longer an open book in which we may read life-saving truths. It has become nothing more than a fortuitous combination of atoms, an Einstein’s stew of matter becoming energy and energy becoming matter. Neither are we able to believe that the answers to all our questions are written on our souls. We’ve given up on answers, and seek escape from our confusion about life in the distractions of popular entertainment, personal ambition, and consumerism. So is there any reason why we should expose ourselves to Thoreau’s relentless condemnations of almost ev- erything that we do as citizens, taxpayers, job holders, property owners, and of the food that we eat and the clothes that we wear? I believe that we have compelling reasons to expose ourselves to Thoreau’s rant. He is trying to call our attention to what we are doing with our lives, with the aim of freeing us to live well. “I speak”, he wrote “to the mass of men who are dis- contented, and idly complaining of the hardness of their lot or of the times, when they might improve them . . . I have travelled a good deal in Concord, and every- where, in shops, and offices, and fields, the inhabitants have appeared to me to be doing penance in a thousand remarkable ways . . . They honestly think there is no choice left . . . But alert and healthy natures remember that the sun rose clear . . . It is never too late to give up our prejudices.” Well, that may have been true of the inhabitants of Concord, Massachusetts in the 1840s. Would Thoreau find that the Americans of today are similarly self-afflicted? Consider the facts of our case. We are taking on more and more debt and working harder than we need to -- in order to have more than we need. More and more of us are not bothering to take even the skimpy amounts of vacation that our employers grant us. And when we do pry ourselves away from our desks, we feel obliged to go on expensive vacations to countries whose history we don’t know and whose languages we don’t speak – because this is what vacations have to be. We are competitive through our children, whom we want to attend Ivy League schools so that they can become owners of big jobs and big houses and big debts. Our lives lack leisure, simplicity, and dignity. I’m exaggerating, but only somewhat, and entirely in the spirit of Thoreau. In Walden, Thoreau is dragging a stick across the bar of our cages in order to get our attention. That ew ourselves have made the cages in which we are trapped is the whole point of his book. So, should we be annoyed? After all, he is only calling upon us to be philosophers in the real sense of the word: “To be a philosopher is not to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust.” Some people are in fact living such lives, and Thoreau acknowledges that he is not writing for them. For whom is he writing, then? For almost all of us, certainly. How many of us have not burdened ourselves at least to some extent with gratuitous obligations and unreal wants? True, the crowds of people in our cities whom one may see hur- rying along the sidewalks, shouting urgent messages into their smart phones while leaning forward as if to butt their heads against some obstacle to their current ambitions, are no doubt today’s extreme examples of failure to love wisdom. But how can we be sure that we ourselves have not become part of the ambitious head-butting masses? Fortunately, we can take stock of our lives without having to live by the side of a lonely pond for two years, two months, and two days. Instead, we need only reserve a little time to read and reflect on Thoreau’s cocky, conceited, beautiful, and perennially fresh sermon about how not to throw our lives away, but to live “a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust.” Note: Walden leaves many readers wanting to read more of Thoreau’s beautiful observations of nature and rich, bit- ingly aphoristic prose. They can now turn to The Journal, 1837 – 1861, by Henry David Thoreau (ed. Damion Searles), an abridgement of the multi-volume diary in which Thoreau almost daily recorded his experiences, sharpened his thoughts, and learned through practice how to write the words that speak to us today.

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Friends of Beebe Library Officers and Directors http://friendsofbeebe.org/theleadership-team.html Melissa Quinn, President Jody Sherman, Director Open, Vice President James Horne, Director Kathleen Kelly-Goldstein, Treasurer Gayle Edson, Director Asst. Treasurer: George Myrus Patricia Murphy, Director Kathleen Scharf, Secretary All friends are invited to our Board meetings on the first Thursday of the month, September - May, starting at 7 p.m., in the Trustee’s Room of the Beebe Memorial Library.

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