Mark Custer

First, I must make a confession.

As much as it begins like a literary masterpiece, I could never rightly claim that it deserves such an accolade. There is something, though, that has been emblazoned on my memory for having read Ray Bradbury's novel Something Wicked This Way Comes. I need to use a brief excerpt for explanation:

"And suddenly Will remembered nights rising at two in the morning to go to the bathroom and spying across town to see that one single light in the high library window and know Dad had lingered late murmuring and reading alone under these green jungle lamps."

Certainly this is an interesting image. Will is a young boy; his father, a much older-looking man who works as a janitor in the local library. Within this habitual scenario the two are connected, though only Will recognizes the connection. By reading a beacon of light, Will is informed that his father has once again stayed long after work to do some reading of his own. And yet, instinctually, Will's father understands this bond too. His father knows that when Will and his best friend race to the library for their next weekly visit, he will be there to direct them amongst the stacks, to offer suggestions, to read in the boys his own distant youth and memories.

I daresay that this singular image has most influenced my decision to become a librarian. Of course, I did not actually realize that it had done so at the time. In actuality, I did not even recall this literary scene until after I had conducted an interview with Pamela Thomas, the Digital Services coordinator of Bird Library at Syracuse University. When I asked her how she became interested in librarianship, she paused, and then made mention of having worked at an independent video-rental store. In this position, cultivating and cataloging an interesting array of hard-to-find films, she suddenly realized that what she was doing, and what she wanted to become, were one in the same - she was a librarian. Upon hearing this, I relayed that I knew of a similar video-rental store near my undergraduate school. Before I graduated, the owner of the store decided to retire, and in retiring he donated his entire collection to libraries (a large part of which was donated to the school I was attending). All of these memories, hers and mine, reminded me of Bradbury's novel, and more specifically, the notion of waking up in the middle of the night and seeing a light shining in the library. That is where I wanted to work.