You guys already know about my love of libraries and librarians. There has to be some kind of irony in the fact that my husband’s first wife was a librarian—and it’s probably only the narrowest twist of fate that she didn’t work for my dad at some point.

I never met her. I have no idea if I would have liked her. (I mean, signs point to no, but never say never, right?)

So today is a day to celebrate all those people who meant so much to me over the years. In celebration of that, I will tell two stories about my dearly departed dad who was my favorite librarian.

In the early days of his career, he got in trouble at the Sherman Oaks library when a snooty Joonyah-Leeeg-type woman came in and imperiously demanded a James Joyce book, The Dubliners. Only she said  “Due-Blyners,” as if it were a French surname (duPonts, duBarrys, duBliners). When my dad finally caught on and blurted out “OH! DUHB-LINNERS!” she got very upset that he was “making fun of her” (he wasn’t, but he did when he got home that night), and he got a lecture.

He took this lesson to heart and applied it well throughout his career. He got really good at not speaking when he didn’t have to, and at keeping his eyes firmly locked in one place so they did not roll right out of his head. Although I was aware of this, it wasn’t until after he died that I quite realized how successful he was.

At some point, we inherited a pile of VHS tapes and a VCR. I started going through them to see how many were fuzzy recordings of old Errol Flynn movies and how many were actual family videos. On one of these tapes was a recording of a public access broadcast of my dad fighting a losing battle at some kind of meeting—county commission? City council? I don’t even remember what state this tape was from. (Florida? California?) But rather than skip through it after figuring out what it was, I sat there watching it with the kid, who was probably 16 or so. I was smirking because as I watched, I could see very clearly that my dad was getting more and more irritated and exasperated and really would have been quite happy to tell off this bunch of clods and come home to a glass of scotch. But he kept a lid on it until he was finally dismissed, at which point he thanked them all very nastily for their absolute and utterly predictable incompetence—at which point the kid turns to me in complete shock and goes “Why did he say that?!”

“Because he’s a bad loser? Because he had nothing to lose? What do you mean?”

“But why was he so grumpy? … Wait, you mean he was mad the WHOLE TIME?”

I burst out laughing. “Yes. You couldn’t see that? They weren’t listening to him and it was clear after five minutes that they were not going to do what he was asking, but they also weren’t going to drop it until everyone with a microphone got a chance to bloviate.”

The kid was dumbfounded. I suggested he watch it a few more times to study how to seethe internally while your face is busy Managing the Situation. He declined but did pay me the dubious compliment of saying, “I always thought that was a thing only you did. I didn’t know it ran in the family.”

So be nice to your librarians. No telling what they’re thinking!