non-fiction

She had seen me enter, and had collected my on-hold items from the back while helping someone in line ahead of me.

I thought I deserved her name since she knew mine, and said so. Just following our how-do-you-do's, the phone rang, and its caller was quickly asked to hold. I protested that she could attend to the call before me, but it was "just her daughter," so I pried family secrets while she flipped (1/1) each item from my stack and scanned its barcode.

Daughter studies business at John Carroll, instead of library sciences, as mother hoped. Mother & I agree we both would have liked to have studied library. Studied library at university. But she is a clerk, and I [am software, and] see the soon end to such books kept in such buildings.

Mother allowed that she was probably being romantic, but said she gets the sense that library-oriented professionals nowadays are more interested in information retrieval than they are lovers of books.