Ralph Gardner Jr: Progress Is Knocking

My work is done. I’ve performed my annual act of civic virtue. From now until the end of the year I can devote my full attention to things like holiday parties and buying that thoughtful gift or two for my wife and children.

My contribution to the well-being, not to mention the greater glory of humankind, is to polish the brass knocker on the front door of the Kinderhook Memorial Library.

And I did an extra fine job this year, if I do say so myself, because the library will be celebrating its renovation and expansion on December 14^th with a ribbon cutting in the morning. The official opening for visitors is that evening, coinciding with Candlelight Night, when the historic village glows with music and light. 

I frankly can’t remember when this precedent began. I’m referring to polishing the knocker. But it was a number of years ago. And it obviously had something, almost everything, to do with my passion for buffing silver and brass since nobody suggested I clean the thing.

In fact, my wife gently hints that there are more important chores awaiting back home, such as painting walls and staunching leaks. Yet few acts provide the satisfaction of restoring a piece of silver or an old knocker to its original glory, especially after years of neglect.

Unfortunately, we can’t reincarnate the dead. Polishing a deeply tarnished spoon to a high shine is as good as it gets. An admittedly modest though nonetheless satisfying method for improving ones’ infinitesimal corner of the universe.

However, my hunch is that listeners will be more interested in the beautified library than my focused application of elbow grease. So before returning to that subject let me just tell you a little about the library.

It’s a handsome brick structure dedicated on Thanksgiving Day 1933.

Perhaps counterintuitively, libraries across the nation are seeing something of a renaissance in the information age, and, with their computer terminals and WI-FI, morphing into community centers as much as a place to borrow a book. Or as was more often the case during my wayward youth paying a painful overdue book fine.

The Kinderhook library also saw its popularity rise and needed to keep up with the times.

I visited the ediface, which has remained open during renovations, last week and I’m pleased to report that the progress is as tasteful and architecturally sensitive as the village itself.

It will more than double in size with an expanded, light-filled children’s reading room and a second one for teens with a wide screen TV where they can read of watch movies. There will also be two handicapped bathrooms, two water fountains, six computers, a self-checkout desk, a meeting room, and a new back patio.

All these improvements join another recent addition: a quiet reading room with six overstuffed chairs and a wall of large windows that look out onto the village.

My only regret is that I didn’t know sooner that one could purchase a patio paver to honor a friend, family pet, etc. (Apparently all the available pavers have been assigned.) Because I know what mine would say. Actually it’s from the Dr. Seuss book that, as a beginning reader, awakened me not only to the magic of words but to the way they could be marshaled in the service of humor.

You may remember the tome yourself. It’s called “One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish” and sings with lines such as these: “Why are they sad and glad and bad? I do not know. Go ask your dad.”

But here’s what my paver would say and it’s as close as I’ve come to a mantra, a mission statement, a philosophy of life, a way to abide the conundrum of the universe. It’s essentially the book’s chorus: “From there to here, from here to there, funny things are everywhere.”

Now back to the library knocker. When I first attacked it many years ago with brass polish and cloth, soap and water, I feared the librarian on duty would call the police suspecting an act of either vandalism or insanity, or perhaps both.

So I alerted her in advance and also explained about my penchant for polishing.

She probably dismissed me as a harmless of fool, of which I suspect the average public library attracts its share.

The task took a full half hour since it appeared the knocker had been neglected since it was affixed to the front door back in – when was it?

The reason I’m hedging on the date is because as I cleaned the knocker it began to cough up its secrets: for example, the hardware revealed that it was handsomely lettered with the name “George H. Davie,” in whose memory his daughter Caroline Davie Lloyd, donated the library, and beneath it her father’s dates: 1853-1931.

However, upon even closer inspection and even more determined buffing I discovered that the knocker’s striker was also engraved, faintly, with the date “1922.”

I’ll leave it up to Ruth Piwonka, Kinderhook’s esteemed town historian to reconcile the various dates.

However, my work’s done. At least for another year.

Let the holidays begin and the George H. Davie Memorial knocker reflect the beauty of the season and of sunlight, candlelights and street lights for months and years to come.

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