At Last!

I've been blabbing about blogging for at least six months now, and tonight is finally the night. As happens so often, my motivation comes not from an urge to do good, but from trying not to look bad. (As a seasoned politician once told me when I was running for elected office, "It's not that you want to win so much; it's that you don't want to lose.") In this case, I happened upon an old email from Kirsten Kilbourne. In response to my telling her that I wanted to start a blog, she had enthusiastically gone to blogspot and set me up with a username, password, etc. That was in November, 2005, soon after she had joined the CLC staff. No one wants to look bad to the people with whom they work, especially with good reason. So enough, tonight is the night. I took my user name and my password and logged on. Plenty of our Connecticut colleagues have blogs, including Michael Golrick, Mike Simonds, and Alan Gray, so it's not like this is even a new thing. And of what am I afraid? That I have nothing to say? Has that ever stopped me before?
I've named the blog BetweentheBookends because of the stories to be found there. There is magic in libraryland, and I am uniquely suited to report on it. While you all are making the magic, I get to go door to door collecting your stories. I'll try to report out as engagingly as I can. I also ask for more than a little help from my friends. So many of you are such good writers, like my friend David Bryant, with whom I rarely agree, but who can be disagreeable in just the best prose. I look forward to sharing this space with friends and colleagues for the benefit of the readers, which we will hopefully attract. For now, good night, and thank you, Kirsten. I needed that!