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October 9, 2002

A thousand books, a thousand days

Somebody once said, "politics is the art of the possible." Aim too low and you'll never get close to your goals. Aim too high and you're bound to fall short.

Which brings us to the Pacifica library situation. It's not good. It looks right now as if it might take all the resources we've got just to hold on to the status quo. I was accused the other day of being perfectly happy to live with the current state of affairs. I respect the opinions of the person who made that comment enough to examine my conscience. Could he be right?

I realized my fear. We could easily wind up with only the library on Hilton. Not good! Even the status quo, two small, too small, two inadequate, libraries, is better than that.

I'm also aware that as long as I can drive a car my personal library needs can be met. 19 or 20 libraries are within 20 miles of Linda Mar. Daly City has four, South San Francisco two. Even should we open a new, much larger Pacifica branch early next decade, I'll be that much older. So that brand new, grand new library we all want doesn't mean much to me personally. I'll applaud when and if. But it won't affect me much. That wasn't true in 1948, when I took the bus from Santa Rosa to San Francisco, visited the SF Public Library, did the math (365,000 books. One a day, 365 a year, 1000 years of reading) and marveled. Of course the SF library had 400,000 volumes in 1948, and they've added some since. Libraries are most useful when you can browse the stacks, select five particular books from ten thousand, and make the knowledge in those five your own. That's what libraries are all about. Choice!!

A baby born last week will be reaching reading age in a few years, and could be visiting libraries on his own by 2012 or so. His lifelong reading and study habits will probably be set by 2022. If he becomes a regular reader and library user, as I hope he will, he and his cohort may still be enjoying whatever benefits Pacifica's Libraries have to offer in 2087, give or take.

If we can get past our short term difficulties, find a central, acceptable location, find the finances, and find the will to do it, that baby born last week may be writing a letter to the editor in the Pacifica Tribune of Wednesday, Oct. 6, 2060, congratulating the Pacifica Library on the golden anniversary of its 30,000 sq. ft. building and expressing appreciation to those who, at the beginning of the century, beat the odds and made it happen.

If that sounds far fetched, when the Pacifica Branch of the American Association of University Women appointed an energetic young housewife, I think her name was Shirley, to chair a library committee about four decades ago, it seemed just as impossible. But that committee got us the library that's served us almost 40 years. Some of the children who took out books from the Pacifica branch library when it opened are now grandparents. We need to find the means now to serve succeeding generations as they deserve. We dare not fail.

My first library was right out of California's raw beginnings, an unpainted store front in a construction workers' boomtown. Red dust blew right through the cracks. The library was rich in outdated, beatup Horatio Alger books ancient even in 1940. It introduced me to libraries. It was a wonderful, magic place, but we can do better. To get our new library, we need the will to begin, the guts and perseverance to see it through. Let's roll!

Paul Azevedo's email address is Paul@thereactor.net. Check his website at www.thereactor.net.

 
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