Day 126, Friday August 9, 2024: West Hartford, Connecticut

Carnegie libraries visited: none.

Days sober: 414

Jen approached Paul and me while we were standing in line to get some coffee. I didn’t remember her; she remembered us. When Paul and I left the Noah Webster public library, he had asked three librarians at a reference desk whether we could leave our backpacks on a nearby desk while we walked around downtown. The librarians looked at us like “What?” They were definitely not in the business of watching patrons’ stuff, although they said we were welcome to leave our packs (computers, etc.) at our own risk. 

Jen was one of the librarians at the Noah Webster Library in West Hartford. Her reason for starting a conversation with us? My backpack had a Libby luggage tag, which the librarians had admired. Libby is a library reading app which I use to listen to audio books. (I have two such apps, Libby and Hoopla. Much like Netflix and Hulu, they do similar things, although Hoopla allows one to download the books you have checked out, while Libby only streams them.) Jen asked me why I had the Libby tag, and thus began the conversation. Jen was excited to hear of my project, and so began to recommend different libraries all over the state that I should visit. Librarians love to talk about libraries.

After returning to Noah Webster – the library, not the man most famous for writing Webster’s Dictionary, as he died in 1843 –I struck up a conversation with Kerry, one of the other librarians at the desk. She radiated library vibes. When she was a child, she would roleplay as a librarian, the only job she ever wanted. She was a local, having grown up in West Hartford, and had enrolled in the University of Georgia for the sole reason that the band REM was from Athens, the site of the university. After graduating, she worked in a school library for a couple of years before earning her Masters of Library Science degree, which enabled her to get her dream job at the Webster library.

I was so excited to meet these librarians, I forgot to take a picture of their library.