My Lunch With Elizabeth
Today I met my librarian friend Elizabeth for lunch in Dupont Circle. She works in the library at The Society of the Cincinnati. Elizabeth is one of the nicest and kindest people I know. Yeah, I’ve seen her get angry or frustrated plenty of times - she worked for a stretch in the old bookstore, then with us in the office doing data entry - but she hardly has a mean bone in her body. She grasped quite quickly who I was and what my talents were, and she also connected naturally with the idea that most of us had the bookstore as a safe haven. With the loss of that safe haven, one of her first thoughts was to worry about me, and what I would do next. This sort of consideration is like bright sunshine for me after working for years in a dark basement at a computer screen.
I have no desire to stop working, or indulge in leisure. I also hardly have the savings for that. People who guess at my situation and predict that I should take a break are misreading me. The best tonic for me is to redouble my efforts on the kinds of work I enjoy. I ought to have more of a puritan work ethic, and I would prefer to focus that ethic on a new set of things. But it is first necessary to survey the landscape: I build on my skills relentlessly. I have always been adventurous in my mind, if not out in the world. Elizabeth and I agreed that now is the time for optimism. All along, with the bookstore or without it, we are living in a turbulent time. It can seem a weird coincidence that one small business should fail at this moment in macroeconomic history, but I say it is simply emblematic: The people spending money on books are the same ones now facing their own uncertainties. Their reluctance to spend is no accident, and it chokes every retailer stretched to the limit, counting on that revenue. If you believe in Schumpeter’s “Creative Destruction”, this is both tragedy and opportunity: Isn’t this the world’s way of communicating, invisible-handily, that it doesn’t want those bookstores? And, so it raises the question of what: What does the world want instead? To those of us who love books - and it’s a bit more complicated than that for me - it feels like a personal insult, but there must be beautiful worlds we may now create instead. For Elizabeth it’s a library, for me it’s also something to do with how people share what they know - the Internet, obviously. But, more than the tubes themselves, a way of balancing our lives and sharing the best of what we know. One of the simple things I can do right away is lend my services in web programming. And step one is to make new contacts. If I can support myself on freelance work, I can continue building my portfolio and work to my own peculiar tastes.
So we sat down together to eat pizza…
We were both mildly hampered by our hangovers. She had a story about a date last night with a French guy and wine with his rowdy friends. I had another night of watching presidential debates - the vices this time - over Oktoberfest beer at the Reef. Elizabeth had not seen either of the debates and wanted my opinion. They have trained Palin well: I didn’t notice a rout. There were times when a grin came across Biden’s face in reaction to something Palin said, and it pained him to have to wait for his turn to rebut her. But I didn’t find her nearly as ridiculous as she is accused of being.
Elizabeth didn’t know about the testimonials page on the Olsson’s web site, and when I mentioned it, she was curious about what people were saying. I was happy to report that it was mostly positive. There was a lot of outrage over the general economic climate threaded through many of the comments. I feel proud to be part of something that would give so many people such good memories.
Once lunch was over, Elizabeth suggested I come back to see her library. It is quite a place: The Society is housed in one of Dupont Circle’s great mansions - the home of Lars Anderson, Harvard Graduate and career diplomat. The library is very nice: Down a narrow flight of stairs I wasn’t sure what I would encounter, but it was ultra-modern. I got a the round of introductions and we talked more about the demise of Olsson’s with the library’s director. But, more importantly, we talked about the possibility of freelance work for me - I got the sense that web site maintenance is not Elizabeth’s primary responsibility, and that there must be ways to help her streamline her maintenance tasks. This is exactly what I was just doing in my old job. She was adding photo gallery pages from recent events, but they are all full sized high resolution images. Those pages take a long time to load. Clearly, they need to be resized - and a slide-show script wouldn’t hurt either. And, finally, a representative thumbnail for each event in the list would do wonders. I got a sense of her workflow, then tried to set her up with a different ftp client, but we couldn’t get a login on the first try. Eventually, I had to let her get on with doing it the hard way so she could have any hope of finishing it in a day.
So then I took a guided tour of the mansion. It is opulent to say the least. One double staircase was measured to fit an enormous painting of the crowning of a Venetian Doge (hmmm… actually it was the Doge’s wife who was being crowned…). There were Billiard rooms, Music halls, Drawing rooms in French and English styles. There were paintings, tapestries, sculpture and curio cases. Enough Japanese screens for their own exhibit - and an expert is coming to give a talk about them next month. Wherever walls were bare of art objects, the walls themselves were painted with allegories. The breakfast room with a replica of the view of the garden from their house in Brookline, Massachusetts. Every room had a distinctive marble patterned floor, and I’ve never seen so much carved wood all in one place. Members stay in the bedroom suites - there is one for each of the thirteen original colonies - but the Georgia room was unoccupied and we got to take a look.
So all told, it was a wonderful excursion. Hopefully a rejuvenating experience.
Posted by Evan Bittner Fri, 03 Oct 2008 23:26:00 GMT
