Unexpected sound clip from my daily routine.
Yesterday, as I went to retrieve my coat at the end of my shift, I noticed a young woman standing smack in the middle of the library's main staircase. She looked like many of my peers who come into the main branch, a hip Philadelphian with a wool hat and funky glasses. But this one caught my eye, because she was poised with a digital recorder in one hand, a microphone held perfectly still in the other.
I'm a public radio junkie with unrealized broadcasting dreams, so I knew immediately she must be from a local station, or maybe an Annenberg School student working on a project. But why she was recording what she was recording - the chimes that mark the library's close of business - I couldn't imagine.
Nor did I realize I would find out the answer so soon. But a friend called me this evening to exclaim that she'd just heard a short piece about the library on NPR, part of an "audio postcard" series meant to focus the listener's attention on a specific moment in a particular place characterized by a unique sound.
Past postcards have come from the National Hollerin' Contest and the Iowa City dog paddle. Today's came from the reverberating atriums of one of the nation's historic free public libraries. In it, the head security guard explains why they continue to use old-fashioned chimes to scoot patrons towards the door at day's end - and, as always, he gives as fine a performance as one can while striking four notes with a wooden mallet. In an institution sometimes mired in bureaucracy and red tape, as government agencies so often are, I am thankful for this humanizing tradition, and I hope that our patrons are, too.
A final note: at the very end of the piece, if you bend your ear close to the speaker, you can just hear the heels of my boots clacking up the marble staircase. Or so I'd like to think, anyway.
Audio postcard: The Bells of Philadelphia