“I’ve just noticed,” Charlene said, “there isn’t one man in any of these pictures. Librarian was a woman’s career back then and still largely is”—she acknowledged Ronald with a smile and nod that he returned—“but even the patrons in these pictures are all women.”
“Is that Bertie’s office in that picture?” Mrs. Fitzgerald, the chair of the library board said. “It must be. The window’s the same, and there’s a slice of the marsh showing. Look at all those filing cabinets—there’s scarcely room for the director’s desk. Never mind that hideous broadloom, covering up the marvelous original flooring.”
“The floor in my office isn’t that old,” Bertie said. “The broadloom was pulled up along with layers of plywood and linoleum and some rotting hardwood back in the 1990s, and new wood laid down then.”
“I feel so old,” my aunt Ellen, one of the Friends of the Library, said. “I remember this stuff like it was yesterday, and now it’s ancient history.”
A small stack of books had been placed on one side of the desk. I opened the cover of one to show everyone the withdrawal slip. A small cardboard pocket had been glued to the inside of the cover, and a handwritten record of people who checked the book out and a stamp for the day it was due back had been slipped inside. The book was The Celestine Prophecy by James Redfield, and the last due date for it was July 11, 1995. The book itself had suffered some damage—a spilled cup of coffee by the look of it—which would be why it had been removed from circulation. All these years later, we still got requests for that book.
“Nineteen ninety-five,” Aunt Ellen muttered. “Ancient history.”
“At least we’ve no cuneiform tablets or rolled-up parchment scrolls to show you,” Charlene said with what I thought was a tinge of regret.
“The Lighthouse Library,” Mrs. Fitzgerald said, “came late to computer cataloguing, as I remember. Not many places were still using record cards like that one by the mid-nineties.”
“The things that matter the most,” Bertie said, “haven’t changed. And that’s people reading good books and loving literature and wanting to improve their knowledge of science and history.”
“Hear, hear,” Mrs. Fitzgerald said, and everyone murmured their agreement.
“I remember that book.” Mr. Snyder, one of our regular patrons, pointed to The Celestine Prophecy. “It was a huge bestseller. Bunch of made-up nonsense pretending to be a novel.”
“Which,” Charlene pointed out, “is pretty much the definition of a novel.”
“You know what I mean,” he said.
“I do,” Bertie said. “The Celestine Prophecy struck a chord in a lot of people at the time.”
“I don’t see any pictures of the library cat,” fifteen-year-old Charity Peterson said.
Bertie laughed and gave Charles an affectionate glance. “Perish the thought. An animal in a library!”
“Speaking of ancient history,” Aunt Ellen said. “Look at that computer. It’s huge.”
From the depths of the town hall basement, we’d excavated a real, although no longer working, Commodore 64. Charlene had searched the newspaper archives and found an article on the purchase of the machine, along with a picture of the then library director proudly showing it off to wide-eyed children.
“That’s a computer?” a pre-teenage boy said. “I thought it was a TV or something.” At that moment his phone buzzed. He pulled it out of his pocket and checked the screen. “Mom’s here.” He hefted his book bag and ran out of the library.
“A computer a child carries around in their pocket,” my aunt said. “Whoever would have thought?”
“When you put it like that,” Mrs. Fitzgerald said, “we are old, Ellen.” Turning to us, she continued, “My congratulations to Charlene and Lucy for honoring Bertie and her class with such a thoughtful gesture.” Bertie’s class had gone to the University of North Carolina, but after graduation several of the women settled in the eastern part of the state, and those from further afield liked the idea of a summer weekend in the Outer Banks, so they’d decided on Nags Head as the perfect spot at which to gather.
Bertie, normally calm, unflappable, the very picture of the yoga instructor she was, had been excited about the forthcoming reunion for weeks. She was in touch with some of the women regularly, she said, but others she hadn’t seen for years.
Our library isn’t large: there are plenty of better places for gathering twenty women to laugh about the joys and terrors of their youth; show off pictures of families and pets, homes and holidays; and brag about their careers. But the Lighthouse Library is something very special, and Bertie was proud to offer it as a venue for the kick-off party. And Ronald, Charlene, and I were determined to show it off to its best advantage and to make Bertie proud.
“You’ve done a splendid job,” Mrs. Fitzgerald said.
“Did you really wear your hair like that?” Charity Peterson peered at a photo at the front of the display. Bertie’s freshman class: the group of beaming young women, arms around each other, posing on the wide steps of an ivy-covered building. “Ugh.”
Her mother poked her in the ribs.
“What?” Charity said. “That sweater? Purple, orange, and brown stripes? Ugh.”
I’d been thinking much the same thing, but I didn’t say so.
“Which one are you, Ms. James?” Charity asked.
“Second on the left,” Bertie said. “In the purple, orange, and brown sweater.”
Charity slipped a peek at Bertie and said nothing, clearly thinking that Bertie, today wearing a light flowing dress of pale blue, had changed.
Which she had. That college picture was forty years old. Taken before I was born, never mind Charity.
“The 1980s and ’90s,” Louise Jane
