Connections: Small World
Our car has been acting rather erratic, lately, which makes me grateful that it is only a short walking distance between the place I live and the place I work, some 70 or 80 yards. The East Hampton Library abuts my property, as well, making a neat triangle between my front door, the Star office, and the library; it’s also only a hop and skip across Main Street to Guild Hall, the fourth point on my compass.
I never have to go very far from home to be enlightened.
The temperature had fallen below 20 degrees on Monday when I set out to return a book to the library, and the big question was whether The Star office’s driveway-side door was closer to the library’s front or back door.
These are the calculations of a senior citizen in winter.
A few months ago, the library installed a handy-dandy beverage machine that grinds and brews a choice of Starbucks coffees, as well as chai and cocoa, which cost only $1 if you take your own mug or $2 if you take a paper cup, and the lure of the coffee machine brought me to the front door of the library. Because it was so cold, I opted for hot chocolate. Continuing my cold-avoidance maneuvers, I walked through the stacks and out the library’s back door to minimize the number of steps back to my desk.
These are the simple pleasures of a senior citizen in winter.
I love going to the library, and very much enjoy its architectural elegance. How lucky we are to have such a well-run and well-supplied institution at the heart of our village.
Being there also gives me an opportunity to glance at a portrait of my late mother-in-law, Jeannette Edwards Rattray, which hangs near the reference desk. As a member of its board of managers, as well as a neighbor, she was a force in the library’s evolution. Indeed, she had grown up in “the Purple House,” which stood between the library and the Star office, where the north wing of the library was constructed in the 1970s. She, like me, made frequent triangular trips between the compass points of home, work, and enlightenment.
The “East Hampton Free Library” had its beginnings at Clinton Academy at the turn of the last century and moved slightly south, nearer Buell Lane, in 1912. Its driving force was a group of 12 local women; its first librarian was Ettie Cartwright Hedges. Interestingly, it was another determined woman, Mary Lorenzo Woodhouse, who donated the land as well as the money to construct the original part of the pretty building, which was meant to look like a timber-frame house in a village in Kent, England, where East Hampton’s original settlers were said to have come from.
Guild Hall and the John Drew Theater, as well as the Nature Trail, were also gifts to the community from Mary Lorenzo Woodhouse and her husband, Lorenzo.
Last Saturday, I was among the crowd gathered at Guild Hall for a Metropolitan Opera screening of “Adriana Lecouvreur,” starring the marvelous diva Anna Netrebko, and had time to think about the enduring bounty of these Woodhouse gifts.
What sort of village would we be, without Guild Hall, the library, and the Nature Trail? I know my own everyday life would be much diminished, and I’m sure I’m not alone.