I’ve been doing some traveling lately. Over Memorial Day weekend, I visited Nebraska with my wife, who is a Cornhusker from Omaha. We spent the weekend visiting the graves of her family, some of whom are buried in the city and others in cemeteries not far away in small towns with quaint names—Valley, Wahoo, Fremont. It’s a ritual I’ve come to appreciate, a way in which I’ve learned a good deal about her family’s history.
While I was in the area, I gave a talk at the public library in the town of Seward, a lovely community near Lincoln, which is the state capital, where, fifty years ago, my wife and I were married. The Seward Memorial Library is celebrating their 20th anniversary, and they invited me to kick off their year-long celebration. I love events in small towns. The folks always give me such a warm welcome, put my name up in lights on marquees, and make me feel like a celebrity.
This past Saturday, I gave another talk for a library in another small town, a place called Kiester, Minnesota, population 501. I don’t ask a lot of money for this kind of event, and for years, whatever I do receive in honoraria I’ve donated to charitable organizations in the Native American community. I make these visits to support the libraries. So often when it comes to push and shove in communities’ budgets and things get tight, it’s the libraries who are the first to take it on the chin. I always hope that my visit might demonstrate to the folks in charge of a town’s purse strings that their library matters. And who doesn’t like to see their name up there in lights, right?
