There are two events this Saturday that are intended to support the Point Robert's library's various needs. The first (2-4 pm at the Community Center) is a Cookie Walk on Saturday: that's where you pay $6.00 (I think that's the correct amount, but if it's not, it's close) and you receive a bag and you fill your bag with cookies and you go home and serve them for dessert and with coffee on Sunday and are very glad that you didn't have to bake them all yourself.
And all those six dollarses go to support the library's program needs, including programs for kids; indeed, especially program for kids. We are in an unhappy time when funding for schools is increasingly being cut back and somebody, some other institution is going to have to pick up some of those educational needs. Here in P.R., that would be your friendly library: not open as much as we'd like, but absolutely committed to providing kids, teenagers, and adults, too, with all the library services it can manage on its regular funding and its volunteer funding through the Friends of the Point Roberts Library. The FOPRL: those would be your neighbors who are organizing and providing those bags of cookies I mentioned at the top of this paragraph.
The second is an outdoor movie night at Brewster's. Brewsters' owner has very generously offered the community this opportunity over 6 Saturday nights this summer to regain your memories of outdoor movies; and the price of admission is a donation to the library building fund, which is the particularly generous part. And you can buy popcorn and refreshments to heighten the experience.
I'm up for the cookies and the movies entirely on their own, but I'm additionally enthusiastic because of their connection to the library and the opportunity for community folks to support the library. I cannot imagine Point Roberts without a library. I can't imagine life without libraries, but there is no guarantee that they will be there or that they will always be there.
Our library opened up in the 1934 WPA-constructed Community Center in 1946. And it looked to be good for 50 years, at least, maybe a hundred years. Who would have imagined then the kind of changes that the electronic revolution has introduced us to? But now, it is 66 years later and that snazzy 1946 library is inadequate in a million ways. It doesn't even have enough electricity capacity to manage the computer load that it needs and that the users need. It doesn't have enough room for people to sit at a table and use their own computer. It just doesn't have enough of a lot of things that a library needs to offer nowadays and that a isolated community like ours needs to have access to.
So buy some cookies, watch a movie, donate something to help your library. You'll never be sorry you helped a library do its job better. Cicero said that 'If you have a garden and a library you have everything you need.' That would seem to cover all the relevant points. But remember he said, IF YOU HAVE A LIBRARY. Libraries don't just grow themselves. Be generous with ours. I'll doubtless be mentioning this again.
The library
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Libraries, I have always maintained, are among the most significant signposts identifying a civilized society. It still astounds me that we -- the greater We -- put up a building, fill it with books, organize and catalog those books, and then make the whole thing available to all comers.
Books, we hope, will never be supplanted by their electronic counterparts. We are fast approaching a potential social divide which may result in a sort of cultural elitism yet to be defined. Will the on-screen consumer of written material become a member of a preferred group, or will the turner of physical pages be accused of societal or intellectual snobbery?
Count me in as a supporter, in spirit and in kind, of efforts to keep Cicero's vision relevant.
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