A STORY WORTH TELLING
“I must say I find television very educational. The minute somebody turns it on, I go into the library and read a good book.”
— Groucho Marx
I read a lot of books, magazines and newspapers. I even read the owner’s manuals or at least I used to.
A friend was watching me examine the cargo space of his hatchback recently to replace a backup light bulb when he spotted a small switch.
“What’s that for?”
“Looks like a light switch,” I said. I pushed it and a small light came on.
“Yep, that’s what it is. How’d you know that?” he asked.
“Just a hunch,” I said with a chuckle. “Your owner’s manual will explain everything.
I read the owner’s manual with every new car just to become better acquainted with it before driving it. “ “Sad part of that is,” I continued, “owner’s manuals have become the latest victim of the shifting paradigms in reading. Manufacturers are abandoning printed copies for online alternatives.”
Reading anything is best enjoyed, “in my book,” with the mental and tactile grounding sensations of feeling the book. I measure progress by turning the pages.
I love libraries, but I miss things progress has pushed aside including massive wooden cabinets housing Dewey Decimal System cards and sacred institutions of silence.
Libraries meant places where a 20-pound volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica contained the answer to our every question and where many of us garnered all the knowledge we needed to run the world using research tools that now are being replaced with touch-screen kiosks and “ask Google.”
Libraries today feel, to me, less like halls of knowledge and more like Silicon Valley startups. We once left the library carrying armloads of books and notes but depart today with everything we need on our phone.
Let’s face it, aging in the digital age isn’t an overnight process.
Much of what we learned scant years ago is regarded today, as my grandmother used to say, “Not worth a hoot in a hailstorm.”
She usually uttered it to express her lack of appreciation for something.
To me, a hoot was always a noise an owl made, but I never heard one in a hailstorm. Or a library.
Until last week when it appears that was sort of what really happened at the library in Kilgore with the return of a wooden owl stolen more than half a century ago. I lived at the Leigh Apartments across the street from the Kilgore Public Library while attending Kilgore College, long before asking Google was a thing. Many hours I spent there because frequenting that storehouse of wisdom was more accessible and less crowded than going to the campus library.
According to the owl story, a Kilgore family felt compelled to right a 50-year-old wrong by returning the longgone owl to the library that was mounted on the roof of the building when it was constructed in 1939.
No one quoted in the news item by Jamey Boyum at KLTV in Tyler could say exactly why an owl was chosen to adorn the library building, but speculation was that the wise owl symbolized the wisdom found within its walls.
The owl disappeared in 1975, the story continued, surfacing just recently when library director Stacey Cole was contacted by someone saying a family member who had taken the owl years ago requested before they died that it be returned to the library.
Cole was also quoted as saying the historic avian would from now on be displayed inside, adding with a smile there would be no late fee charged on the owl’s return.
I must confess that I found that story … on a computer screen. So, yes, I’m working on the transition.
In the meantime, however, just consider me a “printed paper” soul learning to give a hoot about adapting to a society where the world’s knowledge and news reports follow us home in our pockets.
Contact Aldridge at leonaldridge@gmail. com. Other Aldridge columns are archived at leonaldridge.com.
