A kind soul for The Friends of the Library emailed me to suggest I do a piece on the Williston Park Public Library. And why not?
About 15 years ago a friend of mine dared me to give up television, newspapers, magazines and radio for a year. I love dares so I did it. In some ways it was life changing. I gave a few talks about my experience and one question would always come up. “So how did you keep up with the news?”
I would always answer with the truth. “Nothing happened that year.” Naturally I spent that year catching up on my reading. I finally got through Thoreau’s “Walden Pond.”
So after mulling it this idea I decided to call up Donna McKenna who is our library director and interview her. My first question and the only one that really matters was “What is the value of reading?”
This is by no means an easy question to answer. Donna said “Reading builds vocabulary, imagination and creativity.” She then told me she has a set of nine-month-old twins and that she sits in a rocking chair each night, puts them both in her lap and reads to them. Nice scene don’t you think?
The library has been in its current location under City Hall since 1963. It contains over 50,000 books and has an audio, magazine, newspaper and film section as well as a separate children’s room.
Donna told me the library runs a monthly book club, a Meet the Author series and gets local support from Astoria Federal Savings and Friends of the Library. The library has two full-timers including herself and Mr. Pagano and four part-time help. During Hurricane Sandy the library became a meeting place for the community. Donna has been in the library business since she was a teen when she worked as a page, shelving books and I can’t think of a better job for a teenager.
After the interview I knew that we didn’t really answer the first question about the value of reading. I recall my favorite course in grad school at Stony Brook with Stan Wanat who was a leading researcher on reading acquisition. I learned that reading consists of graphemics (seeing) , phonemics (hearing) and semantics (understanding) and that you read by fixating on about 13 characters every 250 milliseconds. But that class never even addressed the value of reading.
I now know that the value of reading lies in what Donna McKenna told me about her night time ritual with her twins. They learn about the world through the stories their mom tells them.
Of course as adults we cannot sit in anyone’s lap and have them read to us. But we can do better than that. We can go the library and take out stories written by the greatest minds that have ever lived. We can find out what Virginia Wolfe says about being a woman in “A Room of One’s Own.” Or what Cormac McCarthy says about living through a nuclear winter in T”he Road.” Or what Samuel Beckett says about the power of hope in “Waiting for Godot.”
Go pick up Carson McCullers, Tom Wolfe, or Thorton Wilder or the recently deceased David Foster Wallace. I will never meet these geniuses but I can get them to read to me just the same. All I have to do is check out the book, go home, make a cup of tea and sit in my cozy easy chair and read. Donna’s kids need to keep on learning and so do you and I. And I promise you this. You will not learn a lot by turning on the TV and watching Friends, or Seinfeld or The Simpsons or The Housewives of New Jersey.
