For Christmas I got a cool gift from a friend’s dog — a copy of Carla Greene’s “I Want To Be a Librarian”. Published in 1960 by Children’s Press, it was part of the “I Want to Be” career series for beginning readers.

Sorry, dog. I never wanted to be a librarian. I wanted to be an archeologist, a forest ranger, a museum curator, an artist, an historian. I wanted to write poems, have children, build my own house, climb all of the high peaks in the Adirondacks. But I never wanted to be a librarian.

How I happened to become a librarian, and a decade or so later, a children’s librarian, isn’t important. What is important, though — at least to me – is that all those yearnings, many of them accompanied by great effort, are the stuff of me.

When I remember that, I show up whole for the work I do today. That wholeness is like a container filled with rich, old soil out of which comes ideas that are fresh and vital.

So, don’t ask me if I want to be a librarian. Instead, let’s talk about whether or not inanimate things have intelligence (aren’t all cells self-organizing? Isn’t that intelligence? What’s your definition of intelligence?), or if children can develop an ecological sense of things when knowledge is separated into arbitrary subjects as it is in most schools.     

Or, as Holden Caufield from “The Catcher in the Rye” wondered, where do the birds go when it rains?