OPINION: What a small town can do

Interestingly, to me, her second utterance was a question: “Where’s the old part?” I felt the same way at first; it took me a while to get my bearings. I think this is partly because the front desk (which is Mission Control in a library) has been moved across the building. It now faces the main entrance. Once you get oriented, it will all make sense — and who knows? You may not have this difficulty. I’m not good at spatial relations. Whenever I move, my sons try to be in an alternate universe so they don’t have to move the sofa-bed eight times. (And if you’ve ever tried to pick up a sofa-bed, you can totally sympathize.)

My sister’s third remark came as we walked toward the new part of the library: the teen area, the computer area, and, with an archway entrance, the Neelagaru Family Children’s Library. “Wow,” she said again, and then she said, “What a small town can do!” And then her eyes welled-up with tears, and so did mine. Tears of astonishment, tears of joy, tears that came from being overwhelmed. One of us said what both of us were thinking: “Wouldn’t Gran have loved this?” Our grandmother was on the library board when the original building was built, in 1967, and we all recall her immense pride in it — not just pride in having an official library building, after so many years in a storefront and then in the old City Hall; not just that pride, but “Look at this!” and “Over here we have this!” Carpeting. A genealogy area. An office. It was pride in every brick. Pride in what Commerce could do. And that’s how I feel now. I stand amazed.

My sister, God bless her, has the gift of what I call the big picture. “Oh,” she said. “You should e-mail Katie Couric. You need to call Oprah. Contact the media. People out there need to know what’s possible, even in a small town. Even in the midst of a recession!” And I agree.

It has to be said, and remembered, that we’ve had a lot of help: $1.5 million from the state, and SPLOST funding from the county, for example. But we asked for that help, and worked to obtain it, and raised all the rest through donations, because our town has held and supported and maintained the dream of a good library for more than 70 years, and because Commerce people gave generously of their time, their talents, and their treasure over and over to keep making that vision a reality. So maybe we were the ones who needed to know what our small town could do, and our library is once again our dream come true!

Susan Harper is retired, lives in Commerce and volunteers with the Commerce Public Library and the Jackson County Literacy Program.