Will Unwound

In June of 1992, I got canned by Leo Weins, the President of the H.W. Wilson Company, for running a tongue in cheek survey entitled “Librarians and Sex” in my monthly column, “Facing the Public.”   Here’s the really odd part of my canning: I got fired after the publication came out.  In other words if you go to the June 1992 issue of the Wilson Library Bulletin you will find the survey questionnaire. 

After I got canned, the H.W. Wilson Company’s decision was bitterly attacked by librarians everywhere as a gross violation of the profession’s core value of supporting intellectual freedom.  To make matters worse, the Wilson President ordered that all unsold copies of the magazine be destroyed.  This was very embarrassing for the Wilson staff because the June issue was the one that they typically distributed at their exhibit booth at ALA’s annual conference.  At that conference, the American Library Association passed a formal resolution condemning the actions of the H.W. Wilson Company.

My response to the controversy, as the author of the survey, was to exhort librarians everywhere to protest with their pens.  I urged librarians to photocopy the questionnaire, fill it out, and send it to me.  I took out a Post Office Box for that purpose.   Almost immediately I was inundated with filled out surveys – over 5,000 to be exact.

Recently, in the comments section of Will Unwound #64 there has been some interest expressed about my running the results of the survey, the results that I was never allowed to publish in Wilson 20 years ago.  Here are some of the comments.

• It has been a long time, Will, and a new generation of librarians has entered the field and they, presumably, have never seen the WLB article. Perhaps you could republish it here?
• It may be twenty-year-old data, but if it’s about sex, thousands are always interested. Even something like “The Sex Lives of the Neanderthals” would garner a huge audience. This is America, after all, where we’re simultaneously licentious and prudish.
• If Will’s numbers are right, any number of today’s young librarians may have been conceived in a library and, you have to admit, that is interesting.
• Will, as a recently retired librarian, I do remember the fracas caused by your final WLB article. I would love to read any stats, news, reruns, etc about the “incident”. I think it is really weird that here we are in a “Freedom of Speech” industry, and you were fired for just that. Never made sense to me at all. If some younger librarians get bored by this, so be it.
• I don’t think it is exactly that we are obsessed with the sex survey per se, as the fact that one of the (formerly) great journals in a field that loudly proclaims that censorship is evil, canned Will as the only way to censor him. I could care less that 7% of librarians had an interesting time in an elevator. I really would like to know what was in the survey as a whole that WLB got so freaked out about! That I’m fascinated by! This took place in the early 1990s, well past the stuffiness of the 1950s, etc.
• I totally get the fascination with Will’s unfinished work with the Wilson Library Bulletin. I’d love to see it, myself. 

Those are some of the comments I received after my post on Will Unwound#64.  I have also received a fair number of e-mails urging me to release the survey results in this blog.  I’m not convinced, however, that running the results would do anything but bore the readers of this blog, which I definitely do not want to do. 

At this early point in the blog’s evolution the readership is far higher than I ever imagined it would be.  I don’t want to lose any of you.  I’m having too much fun keeping in touch with all of you and reading your comments.  Retirement shouldn’t be this much fun, should it? I gotta tell you…I’m having a blast with this blog.  Who would have thought that a crusty old Luddite like me would blog his way to retired bliss?

Some of you who have mentioned that you would like me to run the results  stated that you think the new and up and coming younger generation of librarians – the movers and shakers, if you will, would be very interested since they were too young to follow the controversy at the time.  

These are the librarians who were in grade school in 1992. Well, let me tell you a little story about how much the young guns of the profession care about us old codgers.   I can’t remember which library conference I was at, but I was talking to a group of young librarians and I thought I would regale them of stories of the good old days of obsolete technology – typewriters, ditto machines, hand stamps, record players, 16 mm film projectors and mimeograph machines.  Half of them were nodding off within five minutes.  I learned my lesson there and then.  I don’t want a 20 year old sex survey to be the sociological equivalent of my ditto machine stories. Well…there was the time when my necktie got caught in the roller and….oh, stop it Will… you’re doing it again.

Okay, here’s the deal:  if I hear from enough librarians, I’ll release the findings.  Who knows? Some of these younger librarians may be the children of the survey’s respondents!  Maybe these Net Gen librarians would be interested after all.  

Let me know your thoughts.  Thanks for taking the time.

Beware the first of April.  I’m giving you all fair warning.

What was it that T.S. Elliot wrote in The Wasteland – “April is the cruellest month.”  You want to know why April is the cruelest month?  It’s because some fool decided that life wasn’t hard enough already.  We had to have a day devoted to practical joking.  April Fools Day is not my favorite day.  Maybe some enterprising reference librarian can tell us who the fool was who invented April Fools Day and why he did it. 

I like to laugh as much as the next guy, but I’m not a big fan of practical jokes.  Too often the practical joke is nothing more than an opportunity for a person with a devious and diabolical mind to do malicious and sometimes expensive harm to some innocent victim under the guise of humor. 

Do you think it’s funny when someone over fertilizes your front yard so that the number 40 is burnt into your beautifully manicured lawn on your 40^th birthday? Do you think it’s funny when someone teepees your 50 foot evergreen tree on the occasion of your son’s high school graduation and you have to hire someone with a cherry picker to clean the tree up?   Do you think it’s funny when someone dumps a load of chicken shit on your front yard for your 50^th birthday and calls it humor?  Take it from someone who knows first hand…it’s not funny.

You rural librarians, is there any kind of shit that smells worse than chicken shit? I’m a small town boy who grew up in Pitman, NJ (Everybody Loves Pitman!) so I’m not an expert when it comes to farm odors, but I did spend a lot of time in the summers at my mother’s old farm in central New York State (you can see pictures of Mom’s farm by clicking on the “Will’s photos” page to the right).  To my untrained nose, chicken shit was the worst smell on that farm, worse than cow shit, horse shit, pig shit, even goat shit. Chicken shit smelled worse than the septic tank out back of the barn.  I mentioned this one day over coffee to a “friend” of mine, who took the information, filed it away in his brain, and put it into action as a practical joke two years later when I turned 50.  I mean why didn’t he just put a knife in my back and say, “Ha, did that hurt?  I was only joking! Where’s your sense of humor.”

There’s the rub.  If you are someone like me who moonlights as a stand-up comedian at library conferences (no, that is not a contradiction in terms!), you have to grin and bear all the barbs and practical jokes that come your way.  You cannot let out the deep dark secret that inside your very soul you are seething with anger and would like to get a baseball bat and take a few swings at the practical joker.  Instead you have to smile through gritted teeth, chuckle hard, and mutter, “Good one…how imaginative!” before you slink back to the privacy of your house and stick pins into a voodoo doll of your perpetrator. 

Because I do library stand-up comedy, I was always a big target at work on April Fools Day before I retired.  People thought I actually liked having chicken shit dumped on my yard!  Yes, I endured my share of April 1^st stunts, but sometimes the biggest fool of all turned out to be the perpetrator. In my long career as a librarian, this happened twice. 

Almost three and a half decades ago, my library staff thought it would fun on April Fools Day to move my car out of the library parking lot and park it two blocks away.  They thought that I would freak out.  They were wrong.  At the end of the day when I saw that my car was missing I assumed it had been stolen so I simply walked home to report it to the police.  What the staff didn’t know was that I could care less about cars.  I don’t like them and I don’t like driving them.  So I walked home, called the cops, and was absolutely delighted when the detective on the case called me later that night and said that my car had been found two blocks from the library and that they were able to get some good fingerprints off the door handle and steering wheel.  Because the employees who perpetrated the joke, had to be fingerprinted to get city employment, they were quickly contacted and questioned about a stolen vehicle and of course they were the ones absolutely freaking out before April 1 had turned into April 2.

Some years later in another library, I arrived at work on the morning of April 1 to find my office turned upside down.  I instantly got that seething anger inside my soul where I want to grab a baseball bat but I restrained myself.  The library staff had pushed my freaky button.  I am a neat freak.  Rule one when you work for Will is that you don’t touch his stuff.  I am an absolute neurotic about how everything in my office is arranged.  If you move one of my bottles of fountain pen ink even 5 inches I will notice it and start perspiring.  So what did I do?  I gritted and grinned, but in the words of Shakespeare I was a “madman.”

A couple days went by and it surfaced that a reference librarian named George had been the mastermind behind the office prank.  Three months went by and then deep into the Gerald Ford recession, I put a neatly typed letter on pink paper into George’s in box.  “Dear George, I regret to inform you that the current recession has forced me to downsize the library staff.  Since you are the employee with the least amount of tenure in the reference department, you are hereby given your two week notice of termination.  If I can be of any help in your search for new employment, please let me know.  Sincerely, Will Manley.”

It took five minutes for George to show up in my office in tears.  Since I can’t stand to see men cry I informed him of the “joke” almost immediately. 

No one ever touched my stuff again.

When I was in graduate library school, far back in the last millennium, I took a course entitled “Public Services in Libraries.”  Our weekly assignment was to go to a non-library retail venue, evaluate the service given, and tell of its possible relevance to a library setting.  That course gave me a disease that I have never gotten rid of.  For 40 years I have not been able to go anywhere without evaluating service from a library point of view.

I bring this up because there is this really annoying check out person at the grocery store where I shop.  I avoid her at all costs, but there are times when she’s the only one on duty at the express lane.  Unless I want to wait fifteen minutes behind someone with three kids and two grocery carts of food items half of which are little jars of Gerbers baby food, I have no choice but to head down her dreaded lane.  I’ve tried sunglasses and hooded sweatshirts but it does no good.  She always recognizes me.

Why do I not like her?  She editorializes about my purchases.  You’d think she had a Masters Degree in Nutrition Science for goodness sakes.  “Here’s Mr. Sweet Tooth,” she’ll say to me thinking she’s being friendly in a funny sort of way.  It makes me cringe.  Yes, I do like my cookies, candies, donuts, bear claws, danishes, apple fritters, twinkees, ho hos, coffee cakes, muffins, cupcakes pies, ice creams,  and frozen yogurts.  I like it all.  So why do I have to defend myself to this twentysomething person who if you really want to know the truth is chubbier than me?  I’m at the age where I deserve a few comfort foods.  That’s the way I look at it anyway.

“I’ll work it off on the golf course,” I tell her good naturedly.  Then she says, and this is the part that really kills me, “Sure you will.”  Then she winks.  Sometimes, no kidding, I’ll throw some lettuce and carrots into my cart just to balance things a little bit to tamp down her editorializing.  I’ve thought about complaining to management about her, but all these grocery store clerks are unionized now and they’re pretty much protected for life unless they kill someone and then it would probably have to be done on the job during non break hours.

But hold on, it gets worse.  From time to time I’ll see an article that really captures my fancy on the front page of one of the tabs, something fairly cerebral like “Our hidden beach cameras reveal which Hollywood stars have major cellulite issues.”    Then she’ll editorialize about my tabloid purchase  by saying something quite snarky like “Hmmm….a  little light reading to go with your ho hos?”  Then very defensively I’ll be forced to say something pedantic and pompous like “Actually from time to time I like to take a break from Moby Dick to stay current with pop culture.”  I hate myself when I get pompous especially in front of twentysomething grocery clerks who may or may not have their GED degree.  She always gets the final say by responding, “If that’s your story, it’s okay by me.”  Then she gives me that blasted wink.  Arrrrgh. I hate that little wink. It makes me want to scream. 

When this store finally installed self check out machines , I celebrated.   My inner Luddite cringed, but I  celebrated.  I was one of the first to master the new machines.  Me, my junk food, and my trashy tabloids now skate through check-out unscathed.  No raised eyebrows. No superior smiles. No snarky comments.  No freaking wink.  With self check-out I am out of the store and home free with my ego and my ho hos intact.  Oh, what a feeling. Going to the grocery store should not be an angst filled experience that exacerbates my own personal neuroses!

What is there for public services librarians to learn from this?  Three things: 1) don’t editorialize about what the patron wants,  2) don’t make disparaging remarks about a patron’s reading choices, and 3) above all else…lose the wink.  Of all mankind’s many non-verbal gestures, the wink is the most annoying…much worse than the middle finger.

You can read my brand new “Manley Arts” column in Booklist Magazine by clicking on http://www.booklistonline.com . The link for my article is on the upper left side of the page under the heading -  Spring Travel Roundup.  The article, which is entitled “On the Road with Homer,” is about travel.  Since Booklist does not have a comment capability, please leave your comments below on this blog.  I’d be interested to get your responses to my take on  the ordeal of travel.  Thanks.

While you’re into http://www.booklistonline.com check out Bill Ott’s Back Page column.  The current column is entitled “Self Googling.”  It is near the bottom of the front page. It is very funny and vintage Bill.  I guarantee that you will enjoy it.

Many librarians have asked me how I got connected to Booklist magazine.  It’s very simple.  First I had to get fired from the now defunct Wilson Library Bulletin.  I wrote the monthly “Facing the Public” column for WLB from 1980 to 1992.  It was a very popular column that generated a lot of letters to the editor.  I had a blast at Wilson…until I got fired for running a satirical survey on the subject of Librarians and Sex (did you know that 7% of librarians have had a sexual experience in an elevator?) .  

Getting fired really bummed me out, but after a few weeks of personal depression during which I must have consumed over 350 boxes of Girl Scout cookies, I got a gruff phone call.  “Will,” the speaker on the other end said without identifying himself, “I heard you got your ass canned.”  It was Bill Ott, editor and publisher of Booklist.  That was the beginning of our working relationship.

We hit it off immediately especially after I discovered we had similar likes (baseball, golf, Updike) and dislikes (Christmas, It’s a Wonderful Life, and the repentant Scrooge).  Plus we both discovered that we had a healthy skepticism of all new technology.

What Bill didn’t know when he called me was how much I admired what he had done with Booklist.  I could say a hundred wonderful things about the magazine but let me boil it down to one:  it was around 1990 when I stopped reading the New York Times Book Review with my Sunday morning brunch and replaced it with Booklist.  Its reviews are that good.

The key to Bill’s success?  He knows books better than anyone in our profession, he’s a darn good writer whose style can best be described as “informed grumpiness,” and  he has hired a great staff of writers and reviewers – people like Ilene Cooper, Brad Hooper, Ray Olson, Keir Graff, Mary Ellen Quinn, and Donna Seaman.    When Bill asked me to do a monthly column entitled “The Manley Arts,” I was honored and scared.  I couldn’t write half as well as these people.

As much as I admire Bill, and by the way you should order his new book The Back Page for your library, and as much as I appreciate the opportunity he gave to me to write for a great publication, there are two things for which I will never forgive him:

• Thing one: While I was writing one of my early columns for him I was in a hurry and didn’t do a good job of proofreading.  A couple weeks after sending him the article, I got a very snarky e-mail from Bill in which he wrote: “Will, congratulations!  Your last article set a new record.  You are the first person to get into my “Classic Danglers” list not once but twice for the same article.  Regards, Bill.”  I was mortified (still am) that I had entered a Hall of Shame that I didn’t know existed.  I went out and bought the Prentice-Hall Handbook for Writers and pored over the parts about dangling participles, gerunds, infinitives, and elliptical clauses.  I don’t think I’ve done any more dangling; at least Bill hasn’t mentioned it, but I wonder if my dangler phobia has stiffened my prose too much. 
• Thing two: Some years ago I wrote a column for Bill about how my doctor recommended that I start reading Henry James when he diagnosed me with high blood pressure.  His theory was that to read James you have to totally relax and go into a quiet zone because his writing is so high flung, convoluted, and intricate.  My column was about how proud I was to have read and enjoyed Washington Square.  A year went by and I happened to be giving a talk to a library group in Chicago.  That night I ended up in Bill’s book lined apartment on Printer’s Row.  While I was admiring his books, he took one down.  It was the old Riverside edition of The Ambassadors by Henry James.  With a big smile (which I now realize was a diabolical smile) he gave me the book.  “Will, I want you to have this.”  “No, Bill, I couldn’t possibly accept.”  “Will, I insist,” he said with an even bigger diabolical style.  He wanted me to have it because he thought I was ready for the challenge.  “Washington Square ,” he said, “is strictly minor league Henry James.  You’re ready for the big leagues…The Ambassadors.”   We both went on with our lives and every so often Bill would email me about my progress with the book.  I always lied to him and said fine.  The truth is next to Finnegans Wake, the book Bill “gifted” to me is the most unreadable “great” book I’ve encountered….worse than Aquinas, worse than Ulysses.  But since Bill is so darned literate and I have pretensions of such I kept trying to like the book.  Bill really has a dark side, doesn’t he?  Anyway, when I moved to California a couple of years ago I had to downsize my personal library (think of all the cataloging records I had to delete).  The Ambassadors didn’t make the cut.  It ended up in my week long garage sale. By the last day it was marked down to two cents.  It didn’t sell so it ended up in recycle.  Sorry, Bill, you can’t torture me anymore.

The most perceptive thing anybody has ever said about modern America was Andy Warhol’s famous quote about fame.  It was 1968 when he predicted that “in the future everybody will be famous for fifteen minutes.”  With the advent of cable television, the arrival of the internet, the rise of electronic social networks ,  the availability of Google, the evolution of the personal blog (HA), and the popularity of You Tube,  Warhol’s prediction has proven to be uncannily accurate.  Everybody who wants to make a claim to fame certainly has the tools to make it happen. 

Reality television programs have clearly shown that you certainly don’t need talent, skills or ability to make it on to the cover of People magazine.  If you’re single and attractive (The Bachelor), fat (The Biggest Loser), or reproductively prolific (the Octomom) you can become a star.  Even when wannabe celebrities crash and burn in their attempts to become famous, their personal fiascos are celebrated far and wide on t.v. and the internet.  The Balloon Boy Family and the White House Party Crashers are just the latest examples.

Making fame accessible to the mediocore only seems right and fair in a democracy.  Why should skilled and talented individuals get all the attention?  America is the land of opportunity for all, even the plain and the average.

Enter the Gosselin family.  Of all the plain and average people who have gotten their fifteen minutes of fame, Kate and her now estranged husband Jon have become the biggest household names of all.  If you use People Magazine as your measuring stick they seem to be right up there with Brangelina for notoriety.   This, my librarian friends, is truly an American miracle because, well, neither Kate nor Jon seems to be a particularly compelling personality even in a negative way.  In fact can you say boring and insipid? What they are is prolific: the proud parents of eight children, six of whom are sextuplets.

So…while Jon and Kate have not captured my sense of admiration or respect, they have captured my vast reservoir of personal sympathy.   I simply can’t imagine taking care of 8 children, 6 of whom are rambunctious five year olds.  I have my hands full just playing the role of the doddering old eccentric grandpa who catalogs books for his make believe library. Perhaps, that’s why Jon and Kate have commanded our attention.  “Better them than us” is the sentiment we all feel with some relief.

If you’re still with me, let me present my weekly Readers’ Advisory challenge to you all.  Hmmm….how can I make this fun?  Let’s say the producers of the upcoming “Kate Plus 8” reality television show  (they’ve dropped Jon’s name from the title because of the divorce)  come to the Readers’ Advisory desk in your library and say they want vivid picture books that Jon and Kate can read to their children.   They have two criteria: 1) the books must be beautifully illustrated so that they will stand out on television, and 2) they must be captivating enough to hold the attention of a story hour sized family.

Those are two pretty simple criteria.  To me the key is number two.  It pretty much eliminates 90% of the Caldecott Award Winners, which I define as the award for the best children’s picture book of the year for adults.  Using my grandchildren as guinea pigs, I have found that the little people do not like the Caldecott Winners nearly as much as the big people do.  That Caldecott Winner seal on the front of a picture book is in fact the kiss of death for me and my grands.  

My recommendations are listed below.  They have all passed the “Grandpa Test.”  My grandchildren love them and they love them over and over again. 

The purpose of the Weekend Book Chat is to challenge all of you to challenge me.  Come up with your own recommendations based on your own experience.  If picture books are not your cup of tea then confer with a children’s librarian or get a children’s librarian involved with the blog.  This is not just an abstract exercise this week.  Sure Jon and Kate can benefit from your suggestions but so can Grandpa Will.  What picture books are most effective in captivating the attention of preschool children (3-5)?  That is the question. 

Here is the Grandpa Will list:

Truck Stuck by Sallie Wolf; illustrated by Robert Davies

The Enormous Potato by Aubrey Davis; illustrated by Aubrey Davis

To Market, To Market by Anne Miranda; illustrated by Janet Stevens

I Stink!  by Kate and Jim McMullen

I’m Bad by Kate and Jim McMullen

Do Not Open this Book by Michaela Muntean; illustrated by Pascal Lemaitre

Bye-Bye, Big Bad Bullybug by Ed Emberley

Melvin Might? By Jon Scieszka

On Top of Spaghetti by Paul Brett Johnson

Hoptoad by Jane Yolen; illustrated by Karen Lee Schmidt

Bark, George by Jules Feiffer

The Bus For Us by Suzanne Bloom

The Grouchy Ladybug by Eric Carle

Knuffle Bunny by Mo Willems

Finklehopper Frog by Irene Livingston

In the Night Kitchen by Maurice Sendak

Time Train by Paul Fleischman

Run Turkey Run! By Diane Mayr; illustrated by Laura Rader

New Socks by Bob Shea

Off Go Their Engines.  Off Go Their Lights by Janice Milusich; illustrated by David Gordon 

These are the books that I have found keep my grandchildren entertained.  What are your suggestions?  Please use the comment feature below.  Thanks for your help!

Will, are you freaking nuts?

That was the reaction of a number of people (librarians and non) when they learned from my “Day in the Life of a Retired Librarian” (Will Unwound #60) that I was spending precious retirement time cataloging my own personal books.

Will, are you double freaking nuts?

That was the reaction when I explained to them that I had already cataloged my personal books, but that now I was doing a retrospective conversion of my catalog records from Dewey to Library of Congress.

One man got it, but didn’t totally agree with me.  He didn’t seem to have any trouble with me spending my time cataloging my own books but he did quibble with the fact that I was going from Dewey (“a means of organizing knowledge”) to LC (“a mark it and park it system”).

So why am I doing a retrospective conversion of the cataloging records for my own personal library?  It’s quite simple.  I am fulfilling a double fantasy. 

Back in 1971 I decided to go to library school.  I loved books and I loved being around people.  The concept of bringing people and books together, therefore, was quite appealing.  Outside of the baseball diamond or the basketball court, the library was my favorite place to be. 

When I entered library school I knew nothing about librarianship, but almost instantly I loved everything about my classes.  I especially loved two classes: children’s literature for re-connecting me to my childhood, and cataloging for re-assuring me that there is an order to the world.  Had I not had a misanthropic cataloging teacher, I probably would have become a cataloger rather than a reference librarian.

The point is I loved cataloging books.  I loved the notion that I could take a book, determine its basic content, give it identifying subject headings, and place it into a universal scheme of knowledge.  I loved the tactile pleasure of handling the book, flipping the pages, perusing it, and playing with its dust jacket.  For one reason or another, I never had the opportunity to do that on a full time basis and so it became a fantasy.  We fantasize about those things we cannot have. 

But there is more to my fantasy.  In library school I envisioned myself working at a beautiful tree lined university where everyone was dedicated to the life of the mind. In the university of my dreams , which looked a lot like Harvard, the library would be the physical and metaphysical center of the campus, and I would be the Head Cataloger who through my meticulous bibliographic work would make great books accessible to great minds.  Again, things didn’t work out that way.  I ended up spending my career in five different public libraries.   I have no complaints, mind you, but I still have an unfilled fantasy.

About a year ago, my wife and I were driving our grandchildren, Connor and Sophia, to library story hour.  They spotted two very high piles of sand at the edge of a construction zone.  They wanted to stop NOW.  I had a choice…to stop and let them check out the sand piles or be blacklisted for life as a bad grandpa.  I stopped. 

With a sense of wonder combined with a feeling of reckless abandon, Connor and Sophia took possession of the sand hills.  We never got to story hour that morning because for the next two hours these two children became utterly absorbed in the sand.  Nothing else in the world existed for them, not me, not grandma, not the car, not the library, not even the construction activity going on nearby .  As I watched them in action, I tried to figure out what it was that they were doing, but could see no rhyme or reason to their activities.  They were in a parallel universe of play, and it took a great deal of pleading to pull them back into reality, something I hated to do because they were so blissful.   

That was the day I started the retrospective conversion of my personal library from Dewey to the more university oriented LC.  What is retirement for if not for play?  I decided to set up my own parallel universe where I would pretend to be a cataloger in an academic library.  I’ve had many wonderful hours in that parallel universe.  Does that make me freaking nuts?  Am I totally losing it in retirement? You tell me.

I’ll get this blog started just as soon as I get this box of Tagalongs open.  There.  Now let me just pop one into my mouth. What’s a Tagalong?  It’s a little bit of heaven….a chocolate and peanut butter Girl Scout cookie that has become a very important part of my life.

Is it me or have the Girl Scouts gotten more aggressive?  Do you let them set up shop in front of your libraries? Here goes Tagalong number two.  Gosh … these are good.

 They’re not in front of my local library but they have basically camped out in front of my favorite grocery store.  You can no longer walk directly into this store but have to run a gauntlet through several girl scouts holding signs and pestering you for a purchase.  These girls are pushing cookies and they seem pretty intense about it.  Their signs certainly are: GIRL SCOUT COOKIE DETOUR; SHOP HERE-BUY GIRL SCOUT COOKIES; GIRL SCOUT COOKIE ZONE; LAST CHANCE TO BUY GIRL SCOUT COOKIES.  Hold on a second…here goes another Tagalong.  The more you eat the better they taste.

HA, that last sign really made me chuckle.  LAST CHANCE TO BUY GIRL SCOUT COOKIES!  Last chance until when?  Until I get home and the doorbell rings and there’s another preteen girl putting a guilt trip on me?  She doesn’t need to.  I love GS cookies, which reminds me… I’m hungry. Time for a Tagalong.   I’m just getting started.

I don’t remember Girl Scout cookies always being a Big Business.  When did it happen?  Was it a gradual evolution?  Decades ago demure little girls in faded green uniforms with brown berets (or were they beanies) would go door to door in your neighborhood, and politely ask you if you wanted to order some cookies for a good cause.  The Thin Mints were the big seller even then but there was also an Oreo type sandwich cookie that was quite good that is no longer available.  It was definitely not an in your face operation.  Speaking of in your face,  time to pop in another Tagalong.

It’s not the girls who are to blame.  It’s the Girl Scout den mothers.  I’m convinced that in today’s dog eat dog world to be a GS den mother you have to have an MBA.  How else do you explain the high pressure marketing approaches that have popped up?  When your neighborhood gets invaded by roving teams of girl scouts, who do you think is driving the Cadillac Escalade EXT get-away vehicle?  It’s the GS den mother with an MBA.  I’m starting to rant.  Sorry. I know the Girl Scouts are a great organization, without which a lot of girls would become delinquents.  I need another Tagalong to relax my nerves. There I feel a little better. Nice comfort food.

Who do you think masterminded the scheme to block the entrance to the supermarket with a Girl Scout sales table piled high with towers of irresistible Thin Mints, Peanut Butter Patties, Do-Si-Dos, Samoas, and Tagalongs?   Did I say Tagalongs?  Let me just pop one right in my mouth.  Mmm…. that’s tasty. 

Putting actual boxes of cookies right under your nose is a stroke of merchandising genius.  I say it’s the work of a Girl Scout den mother with an MBA with a specialty in retail. None of this taking your order on a registration form.  Let’s put the addictive goods right under the addict’s nose.  What cookie user could possibly resist that temptation?  Not me, which reminds me… it’s time for another Tagalong.  A couple more of these things and I’ll be eating my way right into nirvana.  

And how about the aggressiveness of the girl scouts themselves?  Where did this suddenly come from?  This has to be the result of training from a GS den mother with an MBA and a specialty in sales.  “We’re not selling cookies, girls, we’re selling a great American tradition.  So don’t be bashful and don’t worry about things like calories, cholesterol count, or grams of fat.”  Did I say grams of fat?  Time for another Tagalong…very satisfying and my health insurance premiums are paid!

The lifetime achievement award, however, has to go to the Girl Scout den mother who came up with the “get your parents to sell your Girl Scout cookies at work for you” strategy.  This tactic is especially productive if you’re a girl scout and your mom or dad is in a supervisory or managerial role. Who’s not going to buy cookies from the boss in this fragile economy?   We’re talking job security…the best sales motivator of all.  Too bad if your parent  is just a cataloger or circ clerk.

Actually in some of the libraries where I’ve worked, Girl Scout cookie season was fraught with fights between co-workers.  How many times did I hear a variation of this argument: “Why should I buy your daughter’s Tagalongs when you didn’t buy any of my son’s entertainment books?”  Speaking of Tagalongs it’s time for another!

The question I ask all of you image conscious librarians is what can libraries learn from all the Girl Scout MBAs when it comes to marketing, merchandising, and selling?  Librarians are selling reading and learning and girl scouts are selling calories, cholesterol, and fat.  So why are the girl scouts so much more successful than the librarians? I’ll tell you this much, if I were back in library administration, I would certainly look for Girl Scout experience on any resume that I reviewed. 

Let’s see….it’s taken me 20 minutes to write this blog and in that time period I have eaten 10 Tagalongs.  That’s one Tagalong every 2 minutes.  Nutritionally it adds up to 41 grams of fat and 630 calories.  Ouch, that’s depressing, really depressing.  I feel so bad that I need some comfort food.  Let’s see…there are still 5 Tagalongs left in the box.  Oh well, what’s the expression – “in for a penny, in for a pound.”  Bottoms Up!   

Junk food for a very good cause….just my cup of tea, and what goes better with Earl Grey than a Tagalong?

In Will Unwound #59, I wrote about the importance of my little black book in my daily life.  By writing everything down in it I can keep my life somewhat organized even as my memory function diminishes.  During this first week that I have had my little black book I have grown to love it.  I have discovered that each day’s “to do” list functions much like an entry in a diary.

For  St. Patrick’s Day my wife gave me a little black book.  It’s really cool.  It’s a pocketsize notebook with a slick black leather cover and a little slot for a little pencil.  “I give this to you on one condition,” she said. “You must carry it with you whenever you leave the house.”

I readily agreed to her condition.  We both understood the extreme importance of the little black book.  It was the last possible deterrent against total chaos.  If this did not work, my life would become nothing more than a random series of disconnected thoughts and events.  As I described in Will Unwound #58, I recently lost my memory and I can’t remember where I put it.

The traditional paths that a librarian would take to find one’s memory have not worked for me.  Books, did not work, audio tapes did not work, and dvds did not work.  The problem with most memory aids is that they stress mnemonic tricks to assist in your ability to recall things.  My favorite “trick” is the example that many memory experts use to illustrate the basic mnemonic technique: “Mary’s Velvet Eyes Make John Stay Up Nights Period.”   That cute little sentence gives you the order of the planets in terms of their distance from the sun: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto. 

So far so good, but there are 3 basic problems with mnemonics: 1) you have to make up a cute sentence for things you want to remember and that takes a lot of time (imagine doing that with your daily schedule or your grocery list!), 2) you have to remember each word in the cute little sentence or the whole thing blows up, and 3) you have to remember what each word in the cute little sentence stands for (eg. Velvet stands for Venus).  That’s three things you have to do to remember one thing,  which constitutes a lot of work, time, and recall for someone with a memory problem.

That’s not to mention other major problems with the “John and Mary” solution.  For instance, there are two planets that begin with the letter “M.”  Does “Mary” stand for Mercury or Mars?  You would think that Mary stands for Mars because it starts with “Ma” but Mary actually stands for Mercury.  So add that little counterintuitive tidbit to the extraneous things you have to remember about the memory aid you are memorizing so that you can remember what the memory aid actually stands for.  Did you follow all that?  Good, because I didn’t.  It’s far too complicated for this Pooh of little brain.   I wanted an author to facilitate things for me not complicate them!  

Oh, and I almost forgot (HA!)…there is still one more little problem with John and Mary.  Astronomers have pretty much determined that Pluto is not a real planet.  It’s not even a loser planet.  It’s more of a galactic hairball of ice and fog , a kind of Baffin Islands of outer space.  It is now officially classified as dwarf #134340.  Talk about a humiliation.  One day you’re a planet, the next day you’re a prison number in a penitentiary for midgets.  So much for John and Mary, although I do hope that they tie the knot so that John can get some sleep.  Good night, John.

Once I determined that mnemonics were not going to work for me, I saw the wisdom of the little black book.  According to my wife, the idea is to write everything down…errands, lists, schedules, tasks, and even thoughts and feelings.  The little black book in essence has become my memory bank.  And it’s working !  I’m enjoying a more structured, more organized lifestyle. This has led to greater creativity.  In the past week I’ve recorded many interesting thoughts and observations in my little black book that I would just love to share with you.

But, unfortunately, right now I can’t seem to remember where I put it.  I think it’s somewhere between Pluto (the pantry) and Jupiter (the john).

We’ve all heard those mossy library jokes about the patron with the short term memory problem.  If you want to avoid grimacing through them one more time just skip paragraphs 2, 3, and 4 and go directly to paragraph 5. I don’t need anyone to sue me for offending them with really, really bad jokes. Basically, the memory jokes are of two variations.

Number one:  A patron is checking out books and the circ clerk says to him, “You have a book entitled Ten Tips for a Better Memory that is a week overdue.”  The patron replies: “I keep forgetting to bring it back.”  The circ clerk says “I’ll waive the fine and renew it for you if you promise to just read it.”  The patron says, “I’ll try to remember but until I read the book that is going to be very difficult.”  Insert canned laughter here and some sporadic courtesy chuckles. 

Number two:  A patron walks up to the reference desk and says I’d like that new book that tells you how to improve your memory.  The author was on the Tonight Show last week.”  The reference librarian says, “What was the name of the book?”  The patron replies, “I can’t remember.”  The reference librarian says “Well, who was the author who appeared on the Tonight Show?”  The patron replies, “I can’t remember.”  The reference librarian bites her lower lip and asks, “Which night was he on the Tonight Show.”  The patron responds, “I don’t know but the book he was holding was yellow.”  The reference librarian asks, “Are you sure it was yellow?”  The patron says, “Maybe it was tan.”  Insert a kettle drum rim shot here and some more courtesy chuckles.

Actually there is a third memory joke.  A patron walks up to the info desk…..no, I won’t do that to you.  I’m not that cruel.  Two mossy memory jokes are bad enough,  and to be honest with you I don’t remember the third!  Another rim shot please!

Actually the third one wasn’t a joke.  It’s true.  My memory has faded into the sunset.  I used to have an incredibly sharp memory.  I could tell you Mickey Mantle’s batting average in 1957, pi to the sixth decimal place, and the years when the War of Jenkins’  Ear was fought.  In those days you did not want to play me in Trivial Pursuit.  I could have given you a detailed plot summary of Crime and Punishment but now all I can tell you is that it is about Russia.  Just like that, my mind has all the retention of a vegetable strainer.

What happened?  Two theories:  1) I retired and 2) I turned 60.  Take your pick.  I pick both.  The point is I don’t remember anything now.  I’ll get up from my reading chair in the living room, walk into the kitchen for something, and in the space of about 20 seconds forget what it was that I walked into the kitchen for.  Or I’ll be writing something on Microsoft Word, click out of it to look something up in the Internet, and in the space of 5 seconds forget what I wanted to look up.  It’s that bad. 

Please don’t ask me what my social security number is.  That’s hopeless.  I don’t even want you to ask for my phone number.  I was registering at my local parish the other day and the woman said “What’s your phone number?”   I honestly couldn’t remember.  The harder I tried, the bigger a blank that I drew.  So I told her, “I can’t remember because I just moved here.”   She smiled and said, “Oh you’re new in the community.  That’s great.  When did you move here?”   I wanted to fib but I was in a house of God so I told the truth: “Two years ago.”  She simply stared at the floor and shook her head. 

My wife has devised a new parlor game called “Where Are Will’s Car Keys?”  It’s modeled after the Where’s Waldo book.  Here’s how the game begins: “We know that Will’s car keys are somewhere in the house because Will is home and the car is in the garage.”  From there it’s a matter of running down a long check list that starts with the pantry (once she found the keys in a potato chips bag) and ends with the floor of my clothes closet.

More serious is   “Where’s Will’s Wallet?”   I am now no longer allowed to carry any credit cards in my wallet or more than 20 dollars in cash.  Why?  Because I’ve been leaving my wallet in weird places.  The last one was pretty serious because I had 4 credit cards and 500 dollars in cash in the wallet.  We went down a list of places I had been that day. ..the rug store, the dry cleaners, the golf pro shop and called each one with no success.  Finally, at the end of the day just when I had given the wallet up for lost,  the book store from two towns over called and said they had the wallet.  My wife looked at me and said, “Why didn’t you call them this morning?” 

“I forgot I was there,” was my answer.