When our daughter was two—and still known as a boy—and I was a handful of years into my position at the library, the children’s room needed a new librarian and I needed more hours. It wasn’t a position anyone would have envisioned for me—I wasn’t animated and sociable, like all the previous children’s librarians, and I didn’t do crafts. But I cared deeply about literacy, and having a child meant I was learning a lot about children’s books.
I moved downstairs, to the children’s room, where a woman named Lisa already worked. When she’d first moved to town from just outside New York City, she’d shocked me with her personality, which was so far from the reserved New England character I was accustomed to. “We should go out sometime,” she’d said the day we met.
“What do you like to do? We could go for a drink? Or dinner? Give me your phone number.” Her nails were professionally manicured, her clothing bright. She was in high heels in the afternoon, and she had a large diamond on her finger.
I was dumbfounded. “I really don’t go out,” I said pathetically. “Okay,” she said.
“I’ll work on you.” She’d started working in the children’s room soon after that, teaching Spanish to elementary kids and leading a music and movement group for toddlers. We could hear her through the whole library while she taught, blasting music, singing children’s songs, laughing.
Sometimes she’d parade the children right upstairs through the quiet adult.