Capitol Punishment - ALA Tuesday

Things are wrapping up. We gave up on the shuttle and took a cab to the Convention Center to see Garrison Keillor. Unlike the other celeb speakers that we had seen, they decided to stage a crowd control event by locking people out until the last minute. This created a line that doubled and tripled up all around the top floor. At one point, it was so congested that people had to tread backwards on the escalator to keep from causing a massive collision. At the end, everybody got to sit down, so the whole exercise seemed pointless and needlessly dangerous to us. The introductory speechifying was in the acceptable range, and Keillor got up to a huge ovation. We had remarked that whenever an author or celebrity talks to librarians, there is an obligatory "What librarians mean to me" passage that begins to sound the same. Keillor spent the entire session talking about what libraries meant to him, so he got a free pass from us, even when he described libraries as the best cure against terrorism. He talked about going to school in a rural 4 room school house where each classroom covered two grades, and the fourth room was a library. The library was so full of cast offs that he thought people stopped writing in 1920. Later, he went to a town library and was entranced with the selection - new books on every topic. There was, however, one topic missing in the children's room, and he imagined that the librarian kept those books behind the desk. By the end, there was not the wild reception that Bobby Kennedy had generated - just a room full of 1000 people who felt pretty good about themselves after an hour of "Library Home Companion."

Afterwards, we took a farewell tour of the exhibits. We went to the Penguin Group to get a good closeup of Keillor as he was autographing books. He was uncommonly gracioius to each librarian and even went out of his way to greet the people like me who walked by to sneak a picture. Bob went on to catch a shuttle to Capitol Hill, joined by 700 other librarians. He was concerned that he wouldn't know anybody. He didn't going in, but immediately bonded with a collegial group of librarians from New Orleans and Alaska. He said that the events seemed a bit disorganized, but he did finally get to see the offices (if not the persons) of Schumer and Clinton. For some reason, even though she is the Junior Senator, Bob reports that her office is much more palatial. He had to get back early to dress in a black suit and tie for the Loriene Roy inaugural banquet. He said that the food had an authentic Native American theme, and the evening was a treat. Loriene came around to every table to welcome each person individually and everyone was invited to a party afterwards where people would be playing pool. We, on the other hand, were taking advantage of the cool of the evening and walked along the Mall. During the day, the weather was the type we had been dreading - searing heat and high humidity, but now things were fine. On the way to the subway, we met a nice young man from Romania who said that he felt much safer in Washington than he had in New York. We told him that we'd lived in New York for 17 years and felt pretty safe there. When we got back to the hotel, we were surprised to see Bob. Even though the ticket said that the party might go until midnight, it had ended much earlier, and he was just as glad. It had been a pretty intense 5 days, and sleep looked pretty good.

The next day, we left around 10 and got back to Staten Island just in time for some serious delays around 3. When we rounded the corner for home, Yuji looked at where he was and his face lit up - "No more hotel rooms for this Lhasa!"