Vol 4 # 11 August 15, 2021
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School Is Open
Students are Back in Person
 
To kick off the new school year at Piedmont Avenue Elementary School, our librarians, led by Branch Manager Leni Matthews, met the students and their families on Registration Day.

At a table outside the school entrance, they welcomed the students with a book give–away and stickers and bookmarks – little things to help engage the families in reading and learning. Principal Zarina Ahmad joined in the effort, saying that she believes that the additional resources will that literacy is important!
In the Library

Hands On Science with Kits Cubed

A science kit sponsored by OPL teaches exciting hands-on science. 
Piedmont Avenue Elementary School Reading Partners, A Chat with Anna Griffin
The consistent, caring attention of a book-loving adult can be a transformational experience for a child. That’s what PAES Reading Partners provides for students at Piedmont Avenue Elementary School.

Anna Griffin has been leading PAES Reading Partners there for more than twenty years. The program pairs volunteers from the community with students for weekly one-on-one shared reading. They meet in the school library – or, since COVID, via Zoom. As soon as masks are no longer required, Anna expects to have the in-person program running again.

The Reading Partner acts as a mentor not as a tutor. In today’s Oakland public schools, students spend many hours learning the mechanics of reading. The goal of PAES Reading Partner is to teach the delight of reading.

Piedmont Avenue library is an important part of its operation because it supplies many of the books they read together. PAES Reading Partners and students meet in the school library, but many volunteers go to the Piedmont Avenue library next door, and often with the advice of the librarian, check out a book and take it with them to their meeting with the student.

Through the recent COVID challenges and changes, Anna has hung in there, providing leadership by staying in touch with the volunteers and making plans for the return to normal times. In her other life, Anna is the one to be around in an emergency. She teaches First Aid and CPR classes at California State University, East Bay as well as businesses, schools, and non-profit organizations.

If you love books and want to be sure the next generation learns to share that love, please join us! You can learn more about the program and get an application to be a PAES Reading Partner by sending an email to PAESReadingPartners@gmail.com

By Ruby Long, a neighbor whose work has appeared in local and national publications.
“A book is made from a tree. It is an assemblage of flat, flexible parts (still called "leaves") imprinted with dark pigmented squiggles. One glance at it and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time ― proof that humans can work magic.”
- Carl Sagan
Be A Friend Of PAL
Attend our meeting in person Tuesday, August 17th at 6:30 pm - at the libraryl
It will be wonderful to see you all again as we work to support our library.

The Friends are seeking to fill two volunteer positions on the Board - Social Media Coordinator and Treasurer. To learn more please email friendsofpal.org.

 
Calling All DIYs
Need a Tool?
 
Are you a Do-It-Yourselfer or a DIYer wannabe who doesn't always have the right tools to complete your project? If so, you need to investigate the Oakland Public Library's Tool Lending Library located toward the back of the Oakland Public Library’s Temescal Branch -- 5205 Telegraph Avenue.
 
A six-day a week service to Oakland, Emeryville, and Piedmont residents, this special library offers over 5,000 tools for loan, as well as books, how-to videos, DVDs, and classes -- all free. In addition, the library has resumed their twice-monthly tool sales on the first and third Saturday of every month. Look for the sale on the library’s front lawn.

For hours of operation, upcoming classes and events, or other information check out OPL's website or the Friends of the Tool Lending Library at  http://fotll.org/.
 
The Avid Reader by Louis Segal

I’ve been an avid reader since I could read. In high school I used to cut school to read in the Berkeley Public Library.  I’m writing this column to share some of the books I love. I hope, perhaps, you might grow to love a few of them. 
Anne Fadiman is a scion of an elite literary family and first came to my attention when my wife, who worked as nurse in Children’s Hospital in Oakland, commended me to Fadiman’s The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down [1997]. It is a wonderful essay, first class reportage, full of medical anthropology and wise commentary. It is about a Laotian Hmong family in Merced that, because of the illness of a beloved child, ends up needing to interface with western medicine. Suffice it to say, East and West do not meet. In this book, Fadiman beautifully and with a profound and empathetic respect portrays the heart-rending conflict of cultures, values, and ideas about both wellness and disease, and culture and medicine. The book, beautifully writ, is a treasure.

A year later, Fadiman wrote Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader. This is a group of essays about, well, readers, reading, and caring about books and words. Our [my wife and my] favorite essay is “Marrying Libraries.”  This short, elegant essay details the slow conjoining of the separate libraries of a man and a woman, both bibliophiles of considerable seasoning, who marry and then try to find conjugal bliss in blending their two ample libraries under the same roof. It’s a memorable and very funny piece.

There are other wonderful essays. In “Never Do That to a Book” Fadiman describes different ways to treat and read books, from those who practice “courtly love” and preserve the books in their pristine form and those who believe in “carnal love” and dog-ear, underline, fill the book with marginalia and even tear out pages. Or there is an essay on famed trial lawyer William Kunstler’s passion for writing [bad] sonnets. Or “The Joy of Sesquipedalians” an essay about a fanatic and competitive family [the Fadimans] who found joy in contests to show who knew the most, rare, and multisyllabic words.  Finally, there is a lovely essay about inheriting a book that her great grandmother received as a prize for her outstanding scholarship in 1886. The name of the book, a book written by a prudish, priggish priest, was The Mirror of True Womanhood: A Book of Instruction for Women. Talk about Mansplaining! Her great grandmother was awarded True Womanhood for her superior scholarship. And yet Fadiman reads the book, a relic of a different time and place and can better imagine the life of her matrilineal line.

Ex Libris is at time high toned, but it is also imbued with self-deprecating wit. There are eighteen smart and wise bibliophilic essays contained in this little book. A great summer read if you love books or words or reading. And you will be able to revisit it again and again when the spirit catches you.

Louis was born in Oakland, raised his family in Oakland, dropped out of school in 1968, worked many jobs over the decades, dropped back into school in the 80s, got a Ph.D. in history, taught as an adjunct professor from 1993 to 2015.  Retired but not withdrawn.
What's Happening at the Library
The library is closed on Sundays, but open every other day, and open until 8:00 pm on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. The chairs and tables are back in use, and the computer is available again, but no programs like Toddler Storytime or Berkeley Rep Docent Talks yet.
Sunday Closed
Monday: 10 a.m. – 5:30 p.m. 
Tuesday: 10 a.m. – 8 p.m. 
Wednesday: 10 a.m. – 8 p.m. 
Thursday: 10 a. m. – 5:30 p.m. 
Friday: 12 p.m. – 5:30 p.m. 
Saturday: 10 a.m. – 5:30 p.m.
 
Thank you - The Friends of PAL received a gift in honor of of Joan Sinsheimer from Kathy Sinsheimer

The Friends of the Piedmont Avenue Library is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. Our tax ID is 84-4203055.
. All contributions are tax deductible.