Dear Friends,
Isn’t April great? I hope you are enjoying both spring warmth and spring snow this April!
Spring has lots of changes – 80 degree and 30 degree days, rain, snow, wind, calm, and the first flowers – it’s a lot. Here’s a Winston Churchill quote about change that I like, and it’s applicable to many things, including the season of Spring: To improve is to change, to be perfect is to change often. Can you think of April as a perfect month?
Through the work of the Friends Foundation, it’s really great to hear about how the library changes lives for the better. I recently met with a long time supporter of the library, who shared that the library had changed his life. He was a regular at the Central library while in middle school and high school in the late 1950’s/early 1960’s. One day while walking through the library he bumped into and dislodged a book that was sticking out of the shelves. He described it as a collision.
He picked the book up, checked it out, and read it. It was a book about structural engineering. He shared that this single book caused him to pursue the field of engineering. He became an engineer and pointed out a downtown, high rise office building for which he’d done many of the structural engineering calculations. He continued to pursue his education and got a PhD in Structural Engineering. Then he became a college professor of engineering. He says that all of these changes happened because he ran into a book at the library!
Think of all the changes he went through and all the lives that have been changed because he went to the library that day.
If you have not stepped into one of Denver Public Library’s 27 branches recently, I encourage you to do so. Talk to the library staff. Walk through the stacks. Collide with a book. Who knows what changes could happen? Maybe, if it causes lots of changes, perfection is closer than you think.
Jeff