I’ve had this song stuck in my head since I got to work. You know how that goes: it’s called an earworm. Sometimes earworms are good, sometimes they drive you crazy. This one just makes me happy.
The song in my head is one I remember by Raffi (on Singable Songs for the Very Young, available in the children’s section) and was probably an earworm for me more than once when my kids were small, but its origins go way back. It’s there in my all-time favourite songbook, Rise up Singing (782.42 RIS in the stacks). So what’s the song?
“The more we get together, together, together, the more we get together the happier we’ll be.”
Are you with me? Are you feeling that jolly camaraderie?
I’ve been feeling it all week. That’s because of the nice, jolly-camaraderish things that have been happening. The fact is, they’ve been happening for some time.
Case in point was the warm fuzzy that came when the Kootenay Country Store Co-op enthusiastically agreed to partner with the library to produce our gorgeous literary cookbook-cum-fundraiser Seasonings: A Year of Local Flavour in Recipes and Words, putting in energy and expertise and countless hours, and insisting that all proceeds benefit the library.
Are you singing yet? “For your friends are my friends…”
But the warm fuzziness doesn’t stop there. Last week, we found out that our pet project has been shortlisted for the English-language Culinary Culture category of the 2011 Canadian Culinary Book Awards, sponsored by Cuisine Canada and the University of Guelph. How warm and fuzzy is that? Truly a sum of its parts, besides being a get-together of two lovely local organizations, it’s a creative gathering of contributors: the ones who love to write, the ones who love to cook, and those writerly foodsmiths who love it all.
Friendly? You bet. And it just goes on. “…and my friends are your friends…”
There’s more: in a truly more-we-get-together kind of way, the library has just partnered with Touchstones Nelson: Museum of Art and History, and the Kootenay Gallery of Art, History and Science in Castlegar, to offer library members a chance to “borrow” membership privileges — just like you’d borrow a book! Library members can check out a membership card as a three-week pass and get a taste of what our friends at Touchstones and Kootenay Gallery have to offer. More at nelsonlibrary.ca.
All that friendly, partnership-oriented, warm fuzziness is a fit with the Nelson library’s draft strategic plan, albeit not couched on paper in quite those terms. Community partnerships play in to where the library would like to go, and in fact comes up as the second in our list of strategic priorities under community connections.
When it comes to our strategic plan, we’re asking our friends to take a look at our plan for the next five years and tell us if we’ve got it right, because never has it been truer that “the more we get together, the happier we’ll be.”
Storytimes — and singalongs — begin again soon at the library, and you can be sure our friend Raffi will be there with ditties like my current earworm (and now, yours; tell me I’m your new best friend), Wheels on the Bus, and more. Preschool Storytime (for three to five-year-olds) runs Wednesday mornings at 10:15 September 21 through November 16. Tales for Twos (for two to three-year-olds) runs Saturday mornings at 10:15 from September 24 through November 19.
Pre-registration (beginning September 1) is required: call 250-352-6333 or drop in to the library. You’ll want to drop in, anyway. Your friends are already there.