Author Archives:Site Admin
16
JunIn Search of the Perfect Tomato
As an adult, I have always had a garden of some kind, but in the past few growing seasons, things have gotten a little out of hand. After having poor results in the little plot in the back of our yard, I moved my entire garden to containers on our patio. Twenty giant pots yielded enough beans, peppers, tomatoes, peas, strawberries, cucumbers, and herbs for us to eat like kings all summer, but I still wanted more. So last fall, my father-in-law and I installed two large raised beds and I started planning how to expand my edible hobby.
Unlike many gardeners, I don’t garden simply for the pleasure of making things grow, I garden because I think that most store bought tomatoes taste like sawdust- a fact that gets me unreasonably angry. Somehow humankind has perfected methods of farming that bring about incredible yields, disease resistant crops, and vegetables that are so beautiful that they are practically art, but somehow we forgot the most important thing about food: the taste. After a summer of eating garden fresh tomatoes, that first bland grocery store tomato of the winter makes me want to weep.
I have found utter disappointment with what is available in the produce section at a reasonable price is a wonderful motivator. After one too many mealy grocery store tomatoes, I vowed to give myself the flavor that commercial farmers were not able to provide. I went in search of the perfect tomato. As such, I spent hours researching seed varieties all winter with plans to enjoy an abundant harvest of flavorful fruits and veggies this summer. While the internet is a wealth of knowledge and the best place to find rare or unique seeds, there is really nothing like a good book for gardening tips and inspiration.
While I found several helpful titles, like “The Beginner’s Guide to Growing Heirloom Vegetables” by Marie Iannotti and “Carrots Love Tomatoes” by Loise Riotte, the best book I came across is “Epic Tomatoes” by Craig LeHoullier. This book got me downright excited to get some dirt under my fingernails. “Epic Tomatoes” covers everything from the history of tomato varieties to how to deal with commons pests, not to mention the absolutely mouthwatering images.
After reading about Cherokee Purples, Mortgage Lifters, and Sun Golds, I ordered my seeds in late February and rushed into work to share my tomato hopes, dreams, and fears with my coworker and fellow overzealous gardener, Irene. She and I routinely encourage each other to take things to excess, so it wasn’t long before she also came in excitedly sharing news of the dozen varieties she selected for her garden this summer.
Over the next several weeks, Irene and I discussed starter soil, grow lamp height, and germination rates and my husband and I ate dinner with our plates in our laps sitting on the living room couch. By mid April, with our makeshift kitchen greenhouse taking up so much living space, I was getting antsy to move my growing brood outside.
Now that the weather has warmed and my little seedlings have graduated to outdoor living, I find myself missing the soft glow coming from the grow lamps in the kitchen and worry about all of the harm that could befall my cute little fruits and veggies in the wilds of my garden. I am officially a produce empty nester, and there is no book that covers how to cope with separation anxiety when it comes to plants, but with a little luck and a lot of sunny days, I’ll be checking out “Canning for a new generation” by Liana Krissoff and “Canning & preserving for beginners” in just a few short weeks.
For the first time in over two months, my husband and I are able to eat dinner at the kitchen table. Since March, nearly every flat surface in the house has been completely covered in seedlings. While I devoted a fair amount of counter space to peppers, strawberries, pumpkins, and the like, it is really the dozen varieties of tomatoes that have taken over our house and my life.
As an adult, I have always had a garden of some kind, but in the past few growing seasons, things have gotten a little out of hand. After having poor results in the little plot in the back of our yard, I moved my entire garden to containers on our patio. Twenty giant pots yielded enough beans, peppers, tomatoes, peas, strawberries, cucumbers, and herbs for us to eat like kings all summer, but I still wanted more. So last fall, my father-in-law and I installed two large raised beds and I started planning how to expand my edible hobby.
Unlike many gardeners, I don’t garden simply for the pleasure of making things grow, I garden because I think that most store bought tomatoes taste like sawdust- a fact that gets me unreasonably angry. Somehow humankind has perfected methods of farming that bring about incredible yields, disease resistant crops, and vegetables that are so beautiful that they are practically art, but somehow we forgot the most important thing about food: the taste. After a summer of eating garden fresh tomatoes, that first bland grocery store tomato of the winter makes me want to weep.
I have found utter disappointment with what is available in the produce section at a reasonable price is a wonderful motivator. After one too many mealy grocery store tomatoes, I vowed to give myself the flavor that commercial farmers were not able to provide. I went in search of the perfect tomato. As such, I spent hours researching seed varieties all winter with plans to enjoy an abundant harvest of flavorful fruits and veggies this summer. While the internet is a wealth of knowledge and the best place to find rare or unique seeds, there is really nothing like a good book for gardening tips and inspiration.
While I found several helpful titles, like “The Beginner’s Guide to Growing Heirloom Vegetables” by Marie Iannotti and “Carrots Love Tomatoes” by Loise Riotte, the best book I came across is “Epic Tomatoes” by Craig LeHoullier. This book got me downright excited to get some dirt under my fingernails. “Epic Tomatoes” covers everything from the history of tomato varieties to how to deal with commons pests, not to mention the absolutely mouthwatering images.
After reading about Cherokee Purples, Mortgage Lifters, and Sun Golds, I ordered my seeds in late February and rushed into work to share my tomato hopes, dreams, and fears with my coworker and fellow overzealous gardener, Irene. She and I routinely encourage each other to take things to excess, so it wasn’t long before she also came in excitedly sharing news of the dozen varieties she selected for her garden this summer.
Over the next several weeks, Irene and I discussed starter soil, grow lamp height, and germination rates and my husband and I ate dinner with our plates in our laps sitting on the living room couch. By mid April, with our makeshift kitchen greenhouse taking up so much living space, I was getting antsy to move my growing brood outside.
Now that the weather has warmed and my little seedlings have graduated to outdoor living, I find myself missing the soft glow coming from the grow lamps in the kitchen and worry about all of the harm that could befall my cute little fruits and veggies in the wilds of my garden. I am officially a produce empty nester, and there is no book that covers how to cope with separation anxiety when it comes to plants, but with a little luck and a lot of sunny days, I’ll be checking out “Canning for a new generation” by Liana Krissoff and “Canning & preserving for beginners” in just a few short weeks.
Allison Palmgren is the Technology Librarian at the Morrill Memorial Library. Read Alli’s column in the June 16th issue of the Norwood Transcript and Bulletin.
9
JunTrains and More Trains
Many, many, many years ago at Boston University I took a course on Middle Eastern History with a young professor who is now Professor Emeritus – foreign policy in the Middle East. I am not really sure why I took the course other than it was something totally new and different but I ended up writing the final paper on the construction of the Berlin to Baghdad Railway. I do remember enjoying the research. From 1899 to 1914 and eventually 1940 this immense project was fraught with politics, finances, and confusion. The reasoning behind such an enormous and long linking between two geographical areas was that Germany would get oil and Turkey would trade for needed goods. Abdul Hamid ll was the last sultan to have absolute control over the Ottoman Empire from 1876 to 1909 when he was deposed. The alliance with Germany and Kaiser Wilhelm ll which included the Baghdad Railway construction was unsuccessful. There is still discussion today as to whether this undertaking helped bring about World War l.
Trains are back in my life! I am now a frequent traveler to Philadelphia on Amtrak. As I travel I am always curious as to what everyone is doing! Many have laptop computers watching a movie, listening to music or checking email. Books, tablets, and all manner of carryon entertainment abound. I watched a man check his laptop consistently and report to his wife across the aisle what was happening to several of their stocks on Wall Street. I see many people reading books on their tablets as well as reading a real old fashion hardcover or paperback book! I watched a young woman check on her little dog in a carry-on. She was very good about alerting any seatmate of the dog because of allergies. I watched a woman knit a scarf and became mesmerized as she did her “yarn overs” differently than I would! Train travel is interesting if you just look around.
The best return trip was my most recent one. The train was crowded and I took an empty seat aside another empty seat that had a sweater and a bag of books on the floor. For several stations no one appeared and I began to wonder if the person left the train and forgot the items! But no! A woman about my age came from the café car and I first mentioned the book she had “The Orchardist” by Amanda Coplin and away we went. She was in a book group and she loved “The Orchardist” and we started comparing titles. She was widowed and was moving to be nearer her daughter – a subject I am pondering to be near my son. We talked at length about making changes in our lives and she assured me I would know when the time was right for change. Then she told me how hard it was to get tickets to “Hamilton” playing in New York! And to top it all off I told her I had a house in Maine and her family does too on a lake near where my brother lived! What a great train companion she was but she got off in Stanford, Connecticut!
I do not know when my next train trip will be! I decided to check our book collection on the history of trains and train travel and found several interesting titles. “Grand Central: How a Train Station Transformed America” by Sam Roberts (385.14 Rob), “Orient Express: the Life and Times of the World’s Most Famous Train” by E.H. Cookridge (385.22 Coo), “Ghost Train to the Eastern Star” by Paul Theroux (915 The), “To the Edge of the World “ – story of the trans-Siberian Express by Christian Wolmar (385 Wol), and “Nothing Like it In the World – the Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad 1863-1869” by Stephen E. Ambrose (385.097 Amb).
However, if you have no interest in the above titles I have listed you might enjoy the current fiction bestseller “The Girl on the Train” by Paula Hawkins or perhaps the mystery “Murder on the Orient Express” by Agatha Christie.
Margot Sullivan is a part-time reader’s advisory and reference librarian at the Morrill Memorial Library. Read her column in the June 9th issue of the Norwood Transcript & Bulletin.
2
JunLibraries I’ve Known and Loved
I started out in the basement, two afternoons every week, all summer long. It was hot that year, and I rode my bike downtown, but it was a good chance to get out of the house. And I got all of my volunteer hours out of the way before my freshman year of high school even started in the fall. It was dusty down in the basement, but cool and quiet, and all I had to do was rip barcodes off of old magazines, stamp them “WITHDRAWN,” and wheel my booktruck down through the stacks to get a new batch.
The Morse Institute Library in Natick was being renovated that fall, and the librarians were asking that the whole community pitch in. I also helped the way that most people did – by carrying an armload or pulling a wagonload of books three blocks down the street to the office building that would be a temporary home to some of the library’s collection. But before that bibliographic exodus, I was already feeling at home. The old library had been an odd assortment of two and a half buildings awkwardly conglomerated around the original 1874 structure. But by the end of the summer I felt like I knew how to navigate the maze of Dewey Decimal numbers and Large Print books and children’s books on audiocassette.
After helping to move the books into the cramped little office building down the street, I felt like I belonged there with them, and volunteered and worked there as a page, putting away books. I was a shy kid, and I jumped when the phone rang and practically ducked down behind the counter if I happened to be there when a patron asked the librarians a question. It was a shock when I’d been there a few months and people asked me where to find an author, or books on gardening, or the Hardy Boys, and I could answer them easily. It wasn’t just that I knew where things were now, but that I liked knowing and looked forward to sharing that knowledge.
I grew up along with the new building which opened two years later, with its big open spaces and welcoming atmosphere. I helped behind the circulation desk or in the children’s department sometimes, as well as paging, and feeling more than ever like it was my library. I knew our regulars and rode out with the bookmobile, and I knew I’d be back even after I went off to college.
The Connecticut College campus is right across the street from the US Coast Guard Academy in New London, CT, and the libraries of both institutions are similar. There were flat slabs of brick and concrete with narrow slit windows, buzzing fluorescent lights, and the depths of the Library of Congress-labeled stacks where no one ever seemed to go. They all served as reminders that these buildings meant serious, academic business. I never worked much with my fellow students or with the cadets and it was a relief to return to the Morse Institute during summer and winter breaks. The silence of the basement in Natick had been great when I was fourteen, but I didn’t welcome the solitude as much anymore.
After graduation, the Morse Institute sadly didn’t have a full-time position available, but the Framingham Public Library did. With its cozy children’s room in the basement and its atrium above the bustling circulation desk opening into the reference section, Framingham was a welcoming new opportunity – but also a challenging one! Framingham has generally been the fifth busiest public library in the state behind Boston, Cambridge, Newton, and Brookline. Every day seemed to fly by and, before I knew it, I was off again, this time much further away, to the University of Minnesota, where I pursued a PhD in medieval history and spent my library time studying and writing rather than helping patrons.
On the other side of the desk, I still loved to go to all the different libraries around the Twin Cities, finding books, audiobooks, movies, and music to enjoy in my (limited) spare time! Two of my favorites were the new central Minneapolis library, a gleaming glass and steel structure in the heart of the city, and the Walker library near my apartment, with only the lobby on the ground floor and the rest of the building buried below ground with skylights providing illumination from above. Later, I spent day after day writing at the Northfield Public Library, a beautiful Georgian revival building constructed with a Carnegie grant in the early 20th century.
After moving back to Massachusetts, I returned to my roots at the circulation desk of the Upton Town Library while teaching history as an adjunct at Framingham State University. Upton is an amazing, close-knit community and the library, in the ground floor of a nineteenth century historical building, soon felt as comfortably like home as the Morse Institute had. With only six staff members, all of us did a little of everything. I helped answer reference questions, put covers on books, and found picture books for kids,.
Almost every one of these libraries has recently undergone or is about to undergo major changes. The Morse Institute Library has added a new archival space. Framingham was forced to undergo a major refit after being damaged by fire, and has also rebuilt their McAuliffe branch. The Minneapolis Central library is still brand new, the Walker library has been completely replaced (above ground!), and Northfield just completed a $1 million renovation to expand shelving and programming space and to improve accessibility. Even Upton is working on a plan to build a new town library to accommodate the growing needs of the community in the 21st century.
Throughout my library career, I’ve seen newspapers saying that new technology will replace libraries, that no one needs books now that we have the Internet, or that our culture doesn’t value reading anymore. Years of experience tell me that none of this is true. People need libraries more than ever – to use a public computer, to solve a home improvement challenge, to pick out movies for their family, to learn from a distinguished speaker, or even to pick out that perfect novel or work of nonfiction. Above all, these libraries provide spaces for all of us to grow up and to learn about ourselves, and the world around us. They have brought together a town or a city or school and created the opportunities for patrons and staff to have conversations and experiences that change all their lives. I’m thrilled to be joining the Morrill Memorial Library here in Norwood and seeing what the future brings to all of us.
Jeff Hartman is the Senior Circulation Assistant/Paging Supervisor/Graphic Designer at the Morrill Memorial Library in Norwood Massachusetts. Read Jeff’s column in the June 2nd issue of the Norwood Transcript and Bulletin.
Player Piano
Alice cleans up when people move, or leave, or need to cut the clutter of their never-organized closets. And she finds, between the discarded lamps, yellow curtains, creaking bed frames, rusted bicycles, and cracked tile floors, the remnants of family holidays, birthdays, and many, many, abandoned pianos.
Most people don’t come into the possession of pianos by chance. Some don’t even come into the possession of pianos on purpose. They’re hard to move, to sell, to learn to play if one didn’t have the luck of being born a child prodigy. Pianos are not for the faint of heart. After seeing a few upright and baby grand pianos passed me by, not even my second-floor apartment would stop me from shouting an emphatic, “Yes!” when Alice asked if I wanted an old out-of-tune spinet piano–a perfectly apartment-sized piano.
“Alright,” she said, “but you’re going to have to move it.”
I had a mover on the phone that night. The next day he arrived with his tape to measure the walls and staircase and doorways. He left, letting me know that he’d be back in a week with a team of movers and the spinet piano in his truck.
During the days before the four movers shimmied the piano up the narrow staircase of my building, I amused myself with the potential for entertaining people with the piano skills I had yet to acquire. I imagined Jay Gatsby styled parties in the summer with swanky people (I would also need to meet some swanky people) sipping boxed-wine and taking turns playing Billy Joel’s “Piano Man” or a New Year’s Eve spent singing “Auld Lang Syne.” I hoped people would stroll by the building on sunny days, hear melodies drifting out of the windows, and stop to listen. But, as I had yet to learn the difference between one key and another, I had a long way to go.
After the movers wiped the sweat from their foreheads and rolled their dolly back into the moving van, I admired the cobwebs and sheen of dust over the maple wood. I cleaned the keys, the legs, the Baldwin logo, and then sat on the bench. I jabbed randomly at the white keys and then the black ones, trying to piece together a coherent melody. A mouse, running away from a cat across the keys, would have sounded better than my awkward playing. And, with each note, I shrunk with guilt and embarrassment, knowing that my neighbors could hear (and probably were already digging through their drawers for ear-plugs), and that the fleeting dreams I had of entertaining would be just that, dreams.
The next day, I went to work at the Morrill Memorial Library, and my co-workers asked me about the piano. How did the move go? Can you play? Yes, it went well. No, I can’t play, I responded. Patty asked me: Well, are you going to learn? Irene played light piano jazz from her computer while we tapped at our keyboards as motivation. I weighed the enormous task of teaching myself piano while working and juggling the torrential downpour of schoolwork from my graduate studies. Maybe I would, I thought, and I had the entire library at my fingertips to help me.
During my break, I clicked through the catalog looking for books on playing piano. It didn’t take long for me to find books like “Piano” by Gillian Shepheard and “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Playing Piano” (which I desperately needed). I requested them and waited a day or two, keeping myself preoccupied with the books I plucked from the 786s in the Morrill’s stacks.
Books propped on the piano, I am not creeping through the scales and the tones and the notes of the keyboard. I have stumbled from “Mary Had a Little Lamb” to “Auld Lang Syne,” but still haven’t reached “Piano Man.” The progress has been slow, but with the library’s resources, I’m sure I might one day be able to entertain at my apartment. Maybe not a swanky party like in The Great Gastby. Maybe just a cookout. And, maybe, someone will walk by the apartment, hear the music, and think, “Well, it’s not that bad.”
Samuel Simas is the technology assistant at the Morrill Memorial library; he is a graduate student at the University of Rhode Island’s Graduate School of Library and Information Studies. Read Samuel’s column in the May 5th issue of the Norwood Transcript & Bulletin.
A Writing Life
I started writing newspaper columns in 2001 when I was a librarian at the Peterborough Town Library in New Hampshire. All four professional librarians on staff there shared the writing task and I was assigned every third week of the month. I joyfully wrote about children’s books and programs that we offered to the youth of Peterborough. Sometimes, I volunteered for an additional week because it was the part of my job that I loved best.
In January 2009, shortly after I came to Norwood as library director, I asked the Norwood Bulletin if I could write a weekly column. They were happy to oblige and the From the Library column began. Within a few months, I realized I was burning out quickly by writing every week, especially when I was too busy to write but still had a deadline to meet.
And so, Morrill Memorial librarians: April Cushing, Marie Lydon, Margot Sullivan, Tina Blood and Shelby Warner agreed to produce 1000 words or less once or twice a year. Their topics, style and humor kept our From the Library column varied and lively. A year later, others on staff joined in.
In the past seven years, 30 of us on staff – librarians, library assistants, and Simmons College interns – have contributed to the From the Library weekly column, never missing a deadline. Jean Todesca, Diane Phillips, Norma Logan and Bonnie Wyler and others have all covered areas of librarianship, including reading and library services, and have enlightened all of our readers.
In the fall of 2014 when I began a yearlong graduate certificate which required five master’s courses in public administration. I realized I would only be able to write twice a month at the most. I rearranged the rotation and some of our newer staff agreed to write at least four or five times a year – Liz Reed, Allison Palmgren, Nancy Ling and Kate Tigue. I hope you’ve enjoyed their point of view, their humor, and their knowledge. Recently, two of our newest staff members, Technology Assistant Sam Simas and Senior Circulation Assistant Jeff Hartman were added to the rotation. The staff of our library has collectively written over 375 columns. At a conservative estimate, we’ve written about 300,000 words or 3 or 4 novels!
You can imagine we were quite proud when the Massachusetts Library Association awarded our library the 2015 Public Relations award in the News/Journalism category.
What I’ve learning since writing columns for the past fifteen years is that writing takes discipline, deadlines and continual attention. I’ve listened to published authors speak on the subject of writing and they all have one thing in common: to produce writing you need to set aside a time and stick to it. You need to write every day. That was a habit I had to learn when I wrote weekly. I found that as soon as I finished one column, I was thinking of the next. I jotted down notes, collected book titles or articles, and spent a few minutes each day organizing my thoughts about the upcoming column.
The problem now that I don’t write as regularly is that I find myself a bit brain-dead. I often give in to the habit of procrastination. It’s becoming harder and harder to write a column simply because I am not actually writing or thinking about it on a daily basis. I used keep a list of column ideas and I gathered information all week in a skeleton “idea” document. I’ve conveniently given up the habit as my deadlines become farther and farther apart.
I’ve heard many authors speak and they almost always suggest that a writer set aside a part of his/her day to write. Although most of us working full time don’t think we have that luxury, I’ve always been amazed by writers of non-fiction, surgeon Atul Gawande or pediatrician Perri Klass and a multitude of college professors who manage to write book after book. It seems they must set a part of their day aside and discipline themselves to write.
Stephen King states that he writes 2,000 words a day, “and only under dire circumstances do I allow myself to shut down before I get my 2,000 words.” In his book “On Writing” (2000), he advises that “you have three months [to write the] first draft of a book. Even a long [book] – should take no more” than the length of a season.
In 1924, twenty-two year old Arnold Samuelson spent a year with writer Ernest Hemingway hoping to learn how to become a better writer. He documented that journey in “With Hemingway: A Year in Key West and Cuba” which was discovered and published after Samuelson’s death in 1981. Hemingway, Samuelson wrote, advised him that rewriting is the key and it should be done every day. Hemingway professed that he rewrote “A Farewell to Arms” 50 times. “The better you write, the harder it is because every story has to be better than the last one.”
E.B. White wrote that “A writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to work will die without putting a word to paper.” When Haruki Murakami is writing a novel, he rises every day at 4 am and writes for 5 to 6 hours. And keeps to that routine every single day.
In “The Writing Life” (1989), Annie Dillard write with brutal honesty about a somewhat love/hate relationship she has with writing. In one of her essays she wrote that “a work in progress quickly becomes feral. It reverts to a wild state … you must visit it every day. If you skip a day, you are, quite rightly, afraid to open the door to its room.”
There are a multitude of books in our library about writing, including those by Stephen King, Annie Dillard, and Arnold Samuelson. Check the library catalog and contact a librarian for help in finding them.
Charlotte Canelli is the library director of the Morrill Memorial Library in Norwood, Massachusetts. Read Charlotte’s column in the April 21, 2016 issue of the Norwood Transcript and Bulletin.