June 11, 2003
GRAMMAR 101…AND MY ROOTS


Okay, so how sad is this?


The town (or village, hamlet, settlement, speck on the map, what have you) in which I grew up is creating a web site.


One of the links is to the town library, also known as the Worcester Free Library. So I go to the site, and what do I read but this:


Through this door, awaits many adventures and new thoughts.


What the heck? Who's running this joint?


Gee whiz, even the village idiot -- and last I knew there were many there in contention for the title -- knows enough to write, "Through this door await many adventures and new thoughts."


More of the same:


An imagination and desire to learn, are your tools.


Are my "imagination" and "desire to learn" my tools or my inspiration? And what's with that superfluous comma?


Even more:


Do you have what it takes to walk through this door?


Yeah, right, like it's so forbidding. The place takes up two rooms, no more than 500 square feet.


One room is filled with books nobody has touched in a hundred years, the other is occupied by more popular titles and, while I was growing up, the desk of the "librarian," who once with pride declared to my mother, who was asking for recommendations, "Oh, I don’t know. I haven't read a book in 40 years," she, the librarian, not my mother, subsisting on a steady diet of cigarettes and the New York Daily News.


Yes, these are my roots.

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