Riverdale Library

My love of the public library in general, and the Toronto Public Library system specifically, continues. Our local branch is the Parliament Street Branch, which is sometimes, some days, a bit of a heady branch, but we are also walking distance to a few others, which tend to have more robust children’s programming. Over March break, the Riverdale Branch put on Marcel, the Shell with Shoes On, which is this heartwarming and funny and poignant movie about life and loneliness and community and the power of the internet.

Alas, it was maybe a bit too poignant, and also a bit of an esoteric movie, and Caleb and Naomi were the last remaining to the end, all the other kids having left sometime partway through. I wasn’t sure if we were holding the librarian up, just us hanging out after everyone had left, and in fact, even when the credits were rolling and she was coming up with her remote, Caleb and Naomi were still watching, because it’s a thing in our house that we like to watch the credits in case there’s bonus footage or bloopers or to recognize famous names or just to recognize when a Caleb of some sort was the location sound engineer or the assistant to the assistant director. I could tell the librarian was a bit demoralized by the fact that she had started out with a full house and then everyone had left, in the twos and threes that they’d come in as. Don’t I know that feeling, running a stationery shop in the techo-millennium.

And it was sort of also great: the thrill of being in an empty theater during an afternoon matinee, all the time in the world, sitting wherever you choose. I suppose it’s one advantage of the two of them having been forced to sit through and watch so many boring movies in their childhood, Naomi begging and begging to watch Frozen just once like every other girl in her class who’s seen it five times,* but this sort of thing is what I live for. Watching weird and boring movies in the library! Yes, please! I feel like I would be less inclined to go if they were indeed showing Frozen.

But I also had baby Junia who has no attention span at all and so we toddled around and inspected the foreign language DVDs and the mystery novels and the people studying and working. She made her funny sounds and gave me her wide-eyed look when I said un-uhn about pulling the books off the shelf.

All in all, not a bad way to spend a Tuesday in a March break. This is really just another very small ode to the tiny joys of a public library system that gives communities these spaces and these cultural opportunities and is the best possible use of our municipal tax dollars and are staffed by lovely people.

*Please note that we have watched Frozen the requisite one time, and Naomi is currently borrowing Frozen books from the library to satiate her now-confirmed Elsa crush.