Thanksgiving week

Next week is a special week--one with lots of things to be thankful for. For one thing, those of us at the Fort Worth Library branches will get four days off in a row--something very rare indeed! Ok, so maybe we won't get paid for one of those days as we take our second furlough day, but when you are so used to never getting so much as two days off in a row, the prospect of having four days is a treasure beyond comprehension. At least for us. I can't help but think, though, of how that will impact on those people who--for whatever reason--can't let a single day pass without spending huge hunks of it in our library. I often wonder just what their lives must be like, if we fill up such a huge place and time for them. For these folks, four days will stretch out endlessly. And I'm not talking about just the homeless who come in here just to get warm. I'm talking about the folks for whom our computers are their lifelines and four days out of touch will seem like an eternity. I know that I don't want to go four days without checking my e-mail or Facebook. Do you? So we are among the "haves" of the world and we don't have to depend on the public access computers in the library. We may think of the homeless at times like Thanksgiving and Christmas, but there is a whole subclass of "less than haves" but more than homeless that don't live very well and are at the mercy of others in this country. Thoughts like these take just a little of the joy of my four days off out of it for me. Ok, not much, as I jet off to Florida to join Cindy and Jason and Beth for a week of togetherness in the sun--but a little!