The Country Mouse Goes to the City

I rarely leave the Point, even for Tsawwassen, but last Sunday I went to North Vancouver and unto the North Van Library.  My Gracious!  That's some library: banks of public computers for users, special glassed in rooms where people could study together (and thus talk and not bother others), other special rooms of exquisite quiet with only tiny keyboard tapping, yet more rooms with multiple love seats where a parent and child could sit and read a book together.  It was simply amazing.  Not just books and reference and checking in and out at all.

Of course, we're not the size of North Van so we're not going to be able to have all of those amenities: but we could have a little art show like they were having (which was why I was there), we could have a comfortable chair or two, we could have a special room for meetings, we could have a children's section that was big enough for both the children and their parents with maybe at least ONE love seat.  And we could have not multiple banks of public computers but more than one public computer.  And a table and chairs where you could sit with your own laptop or netbook or tablet if you are so lucky to have one.  And windows that open onto the trees that are the basic visual resource of Point Roberts (not, alas, that open onto the ocean: wrong siting for that).

At the North Van library, I was reintroduced to how wonderful a library can be just from an aesthetic viewpoint, but also what a spectacular community asset it is.  Let me tell you,  on a Sunday afternoon, almost all of those love seats were filled, those tables were occupied, those computers in use.  In North Van, they're probably wishing they had more of those things.  Here we're still wishing we had a few of those things.  But we can have them if, as a community and as individuals, we get behind this project to raise a half million to renovate the Julius Firehall.

And, incidentally, we're up to ***4*** people of those metaphoric 500 donations of $1,000 each.  More of that, however, in the next post.