The real estate offices were deserted, the hotels had more waiters than guests; empty stores and vacant houses became numerous on all sides. Day after day and year after year the bright sun shone upon quiet streets and store-keepers staring out of the door at an almost unbroken vacancy. Many a man in San Diego during those long years that followed sat and looked at nothing long enough to have made a fine lawyer, doctor, engineer, or a fine literary scholar if he had only substituted a book for the empty door-way.We closed the library to the public the day I got tested for Covid-19. Back then, it took two weeks to get results. When I returned from my two-week quarantine with a negative result, home delivery of books to local customers was already in full swing. As methods were tweaked and streamlined, we fell into a regular rhythm. There was a core group of five of us left in our modern, white, cool to the touch library building, after furloughs of part-time staff had happened and most of the librarians had begun working remotely. We handled the entire process. Some of us pulled the holds requested each day, checked them in to generate a slip of paper with the customer’s name for each item, cleaned the materials, and then grouped them alphabetically. The next morning, the books got checked out and bagged. We labeled the bags, and when the opportunity presented itself, I traced the cover art of the children’s picture books peeking through the translucent, white bags with a blue permanent marker. We numbered the bags based on routes generated by this fabulous app for the most efficient delivery around the city.
Then, two of our staff, on occasion, three, went out to make anywhere from twenty-five to fifty-five deliveries each, often with multiple bags or boxes for a single household, while a couple of us, and on occasion, three, pulled items from as many as nineteen double-sided pages for the next day’s deliveries. When there were more items to be cleaned than we could handle at the end of the day, anyone in-house joined us for an impromptu, socially-distanced work party. Our administrative secretary could regularly be seen flitting around, phone in hand taking care of special requests from older patrons without computers or fixing delivery issues.
So it went, day-in, day-out, with our usual work tasks falling to the wayside. Though, since we stopped placing orders for new materials early on and had no in-house patrons, some things were not as pressing for completion. Between taking each other’s temperatures and writing “Enjoy!” on previously California-banned plastic bags, our old lives fell away and were replaced with history in the making. Within our part of the story, conversations were had and connections were made that bonded us through a shared experience that was wholly unique. I don’t know of any other library that offered this service. We became our own household. The occasional “visitor” from our work-from-home crew would come in from time-to-time, sometimes to record a children’s story time for social media. We were chastised for being too loud while they filmed; the stereotypically quiet library setting had transformed into a place where belly laughs were a regular occurrence. Later, when the Zoom STEAM camp meetings started, it always brought a smile to my face as I passed by a young staff member, hearing her animated interactions with the kids in their virtual setting.
Over time, I began to notice patterns in the reading, listening, and viewing choices of those we delivered to. Of course, in the pre-pandemic days, we could also see what people checked out, unless they used the self-checkout machines. But then, that was the world where personal interactions filled in the spaces between the stacks of materials headed out the door. It was always enjoyable to wonder with a customer whether a new book or movie would live up to the hype or to discuss favorite authors or the best books on a topic. This quarantine work showed us a kaleidoscope of where our thinking can go when a confinement starts and how each turn can change the delicate path as it meandered longer and longer throughout this year of our lives.
Many a book was rescued from the oblivion of the discard cart because it got checked out when patrons remembered an old favorite or wanted that book they always meant to read from the past. With each pardon, I secretly rejoiced. Within a few weeks of quarantine, I saw more start-up business and creative how-to books going out. Later, the stream turned to more financial independence books. And later still, more art books. Audiobooks that had gathered dust on the tops of their cases found a new popularity as patrons varied their reading media. We were happy to dust them off to be sent out, using pandemic-approved disinfecting wipes as our cleaning product of choice.
I loved when adults and children went on a run with a topic. Horses, space, and backyard chicken-raising books were just a few of the themes that our city’s residents took to becoming experts in during their seclusion. Reflecting the tragedy of George Floyd’s death and a renewed emphasis on BLM, books on racism, African-American history, BIPOC picture books, and those written by black authors went out in large numbers. As with the trend found on many social media posts, our customers also checked out their share of baking books. Jewelry making, foreign language guides, and books on various aspects of religious history and thought were also popular. The classics were highly sought after, both in books and in movies. Many old and new authors found their entire oeuvres conscientiously devoured by readers at home for the duration. This immersion would often, to my delight, include the author’s biographies and film adaptations, creating a multi-media, expansive knowledge base on an author’s work. With such an outpouring of materials, I chuckled when what first seemed odd in a bumpy book cover became more and more common, and it finally dawned on me, “Yes, we live in a coastal city...and there will be sand inside the Mylar covers of books whose days have been previously spent uninhibited at the beach.”
The largest number of books going out were consistently our children’s books; some households would request dozens of books for their kids. We often went off on a search for just the right empty box to transport these requests, where the parents would have likely brought in their wagon or some other transport on wheels in the days when they could still visit the library in person. At various times, we also sent free books and craft kits put together by our Children’s staff. One customer told me that her kids behaved as if they had won the lottery when their books arrived with activity bags. How can that not be gratifying to create such excitement in little ones?
Pulling books from series collections, my co-worker and I quickly felt the intense frustration of not being able to find that one specific children’s title whose series name was on the spine of every book rather than the individual book title. So each physical book of a sometimes very large series collection had to be pulled off the shelf to find the exact title that had been requested. Focused on processing new collection items and catalog errors, we did not regularly see the reality of the in-between experiences before checkout. After much discussion, we developed a new labeling scheme for one such perpetrator, knowing that it would in the future also ease the frustration of our usual holds-pulling staff and customers looking for a specific book within that series!
Wandering the quiet, dim library to fill holds requests led me past display cases cheering the new decade and encouraging new starts for the first chapter of 2020. It felt amusing, in a melancholic “what might have been” kind of way. I sometimes felt lonely and stuck in an episode of “The Twilight Zone” when I would walk by my furloughed co-worker’s desk, her March calendar page still on display. As time passed, this new reality felt normal. Now as our reality changes again with curbside pick-up and the return of dearly missed co-workers, this moment in time will solidify itself into memory along with the minutiae of my marker covered hands, treasured mint brownies, and home delivery patrons’ thank you notes posted in the check-in room.
I already loved working at this city's library during my short tenure, but the fact that we were able to continue to provide service to a large number of our customers made me proud to be a librarian and grateful to be a part of this team. To be able to offer some personal contact for those in our elderly community and fun, on-going literacy for the kids in the midst of this bizarre and surreal period in our history has been especially rewarding. I hope these positive memories will remain with the children throughout their lives. They will in mine. Just as we grew up hearing stories about life during the Great Depression from parents or grandparents, I love to imagine these kids sharing the experience of having books delivered to their house while Covid-19 raged throughout the world with their children and grandchildren.
With our new normal, I move forward with more knowledge of the best-selling fiction authors and their books, where I had previously focused on non-fiction, as well as a broader understanding of my new library’s inner workings. Someday, I look forward to putting faces to the names I’ve gotten to know over the past months. And talking about their new favorite books.
The opening quote is from The City and County of San Diego by Theodore S. Van Dyke, 1888.
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