The Apostrophe Blog
Today was my first visit to the recently remodeled, newly reopened North Portland branch of the Multnomah County Library to return books I had finished reading, to pick up new ones waiting for me on the hold shelf. North Portland Library began as the North Albina Reading Room in 1909. The Jacobethan-style library was built in 1913 and renovated in 1999. The building closed in April 2023 for construction which included additional space to accommodate a new Black Cultural Center, updated technology, and new artwork. I took the photo above in the new Black Cultural Center where there is currently an exhibit of lovely black-and-white photos from the family albums of Black Portland residents. This mural-on-glass graces the windows next to the door that leads out into a new outdoor gathering space.
The public library remains my happy place, a place of solace and refuge in these crazy times. Everything sure feels like it is bad and getting worse by the day of late. I do not think I am the only person finding it a challenge to stay cool, calm, and collected while chaos rains its plunder down upon the United States government in department after department, agency after agency in Washington, D.C. for starters. And, it is a challenge to keep perspective when the mainstream media continues their shameful normalizing of the demented criminal/emperor with no clothes and the wrecking ball of his man-child/troll billionaire helper and his little-boy minions. So much cruelty, stupidity, greed, malice, ignorance, incompetence, cowardice, censorship, shamelessness, arrogance, lying, disinformation, misinformation, hate—the list is already long and I have barely gotten started. Well, none of these behaviors were on display in the welcoming quiet of the reading room of the North Portland library when I stopped by to pick up a book earlier today. There were smiles on the faces of helpful people who seemed to actually like their jobs. There were people browsing, reading, using the internet on a borrowed laptop.
I am grateful that, here in Portland, Oregon, we still have at least this one “nice thing“—a free-to-use public library, a community treasure. All of us everywhere need to be patronizing our hometown libraries in these oh-so-dangerous, authoritarian-adjacent days. I think we need their resources and services now more than ever.
Interests: Reading, writing, not arithmetic. The art and craft of poetry. Photography. Vegetable and flower gardening especially heirloom bulbs and dahlias. Movies in real theatres. Theatre on real stages. Art in real galleries. Crossword puzzles and, of course, Wordle. Singer-songwriters like Aimee Mann and Patti Griffin. All kinds of music especially 1930s jazz. Venice, Italy! The Dude abides.
- We Can Still Have (Some) Nice Things - February 19, 2025
- Keep on reading in the free (for now) world… - February 12, 2025
- Publication News: Passager - February 10, 2025
