I feel bad about...

When I saw the new Nora Ephron come in as one of our one-week loan express books, I thought, "Oh that might be entertaining." I didn't give it a good hard look, except to note the call number was Dewey 814.54. A quick glance around the first Dewey Decimal Classification examples on the web I come across, and I find: "Errant essays", "You can fool all the people all the time", "Maybe maybe not second thoughts from a secret life", and other intriguing titles. Thank you Lucy A. Phillips Library, Snow College, Ephraim, UT. (I know, I say I won't get all caught up in subject headings so much, and now I am carrying on about classification...forgive me. I truly can't help it.)

I glanced at the title and cover, and thought I saw a pill bottle. Since staff may not borrow express books (a terrific policy if you ask me), when I saw it again around December, I put a reserve on it. I think I was 86 of 86 on the list. But that was ok. I like to get reserves in as little surprise presents. The serendipity of the timing appeals to me. I don't think there anything in Ranganathan, but I think the right books come to me at the right time. That's about as new age as I will get about library science.

I brought it home with me just before I came down with the creeping crud a week ago. Perfect, right? I'd read Crazy Salad and Heartburn before the last Ice Age. I knew about Sleepless in Seattle and You've Got Mail. Plus I'd read some Dan Greenberg. I lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in the 80s, so it was like reading romans á clef about the neighbors.

To be completely fair, maybe there wasn't a book on the planet that I would have found funny this last week. I wanted a book about neck pain, something I know and think about often. That probably wouldn't have tickled my funny bone either. Krikey, it takes me pages, but I wake up. She's talking about wrinkles! Maybe when I am over fifty, this will have import? Then I started ruminating about being what I call "the bottom of the boom." I am ten-fifteen years younger than the first intrepid boomers. Since I am ten years younger than my eldest siblings (twins, so the plural is correct), that difference inside the boom has always been clear to me.

Every school I ever attended was in terrible physical shape, and had more space than was used. That was because the Boom had been there. But the Boom was ebbing rapidly. When a sibling seven years older than I went to a bus stop in high school, it had thirty kids at it every morning. When my brother went to the same stop three years later, there was maybe fifteen kids. When I started four years later, there were seven. We discovered that the elementary school buses didn't stop there anymore. After we graduated, it wouldn't be a bus stop.

When I left elementary school, they renovated the school on an "open classroom" plan. (The main thing I noticed was that the library got moved from the ground floor to very spacious digs on the first floor.) Sometime in the following fifteen years, the school closed. It is now a Ukrainian community center. After I graduated junior high, that building was remodeled extensively. Then it was bull-dozed to make room for an extended-care facility. Do I have to tell you about the two high school buildings I attended? Guess what happened to my college after I graduated? Actually, it is still there, but when I saw it last year, only four buildings seemed familiar.

This is not Nora Ephron's fault! But sometime in the last twenty years, I had the thought, "At least once the Baby Boomers start aging, that too will become cool/attractive/admirable." Because, it's been all about them for most of my life--their music, movies, books (explaining why I've read both From the Terrace and Peyton Place), clothes, protests, life styles, diets, dysfunctions...I am not saying this resentfully, though I fear it sounds that way. I am thankful for the trail-blazing. I have noticed that people with grey hair now can be seen in ads and commercials looking all that. Great! I think it's long past the time we need to worship the cult of youth... Let's do it boomers, let's act our age!

Now, about my neck. It is made of spun sugar. The least little thing upsets it. Because I am a mean, bitter person, this morning while I was teaching PC Basics for Seniors before we opened, it took matters into it's own nerve endings and spasmed. Ouch! And still ouch six hours later. I feel very bad about it. I will even give Nora some credit for exposing the real truth about our purses, if that will help. (I have not said a word about people who live in rent-controlled apartments in the Apthorp getting what they deserve. Why am I so in love with that convention? I must myself grow up.)

So maybe Nora didn't make me laugh, and probably this post won't make anyone laugh. It's just more in my reader's-experience-subjectivity vein. If anyone can come up with a short tag for that, let me know!