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  • Adventures with Friends of the Library
  • Phillip Parotti (bio)

It is generally assumed that small-town living can be a delight, and the assumption is true. It is often assumed that all small towns are alike, and that assumption is false. This explains, perhaps, why, after enduring thirty-two years amidst the heat and extreme humidity of deep East Texas, my wife and I elected to trade one small town for another and retire to the dry high altitude and four gentle seasons of our hometown in the mountains of southwestern New Mexico. Silver City, we discovered, only after we had left it to begin our careers, seemed unique. Blending mining interests, cattle ranching, a rich tradition in the arts, and the cultural atmosphere surrounding a good college, the tone of the town, compared with other small communities in which we had lived, was invigorating and friendly, wholly magnetic. And historically the town had had one more thing going for it: before the beginning of the twentieth century and before miracle drugs, large numbers of lungers (tuberculosis patients), most of them well heeled and well educated, had flocked to the area seeking the high dry air as the best means for arresting their disease. Our bank president had been a Rhodes scholar around the time that Edward vii had been crowned; my Boy Scout master, having caught tb while serving in the U.S. Army during World War i, earned his law degree from Notre Dame, while his neighbor, a wealthy rancher who even in the late forties still liked to hitch mules to his wagon and drive them into town, had been graduated with high marks from Princeton. Along with hundreds of others, virtually all of these people were voracious readers, so conversations over morning coffee—conversations that my father sometimes permitted me to audit—often turned on politics but just as often turned on discussions of figures such as Cervantes, Twain, Homer, Darwin, or Plato. Compared with talk over coffee in other places I have lived, this habit seemed exceptional; and upon returning, after more than four decades away, I was pleased to find that much reading continues, and that, I think, explains how we became involved with an ongoing adventure.

My wife and I hadn't been back in town for more than a week before a friend of a friend stopped us on the street and asked us to volunteer for the Friends of the Library. We were not foolish, you will understand; we knew the meaning of the word volunteer and the endless hours of work that went with it, so we offered a polite no in response, giving as our excuse the fact that we had just retired, wanted a year off before we took up anything new, and had just purchased our first pickup as a means of conveyance to assorted trout streams. The friend of our friend smiled, accepted our excuse with a polite of course, and approached us again one week later and then kept after [End Page 570] us for two or three months until we finally allowed ourselves to be recruited. Well, why not? we thought. In the first place we both wanted to give something back to a community that had given us so much, and in the second we both loved books: my wife, a librarian, had started her professional life in the very library that we planned to support, and I had spent most of my professional life teaching English, American, and world literature, so we assumed from the start that our efforts as volunteers would be a good fit, and they were. With regard to the pickup and the trout fishing, we made exactly one fishing trip before the game-and-fish people decided to poison all of the rainbow and brown trout in our favorite streams, making a misguided attempt to reintroduce the native Gila trout to waters where the species had once been plentiful but where, since their reintroduction, the fish have steadily refused to breed. Nevertheless our pickup proved its worth and proved to be the best bargain into which the Silver City Public Library ever fell because, by a conservative estimate...

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