Inadvertent two-library Saturday! We trooped over to Fields Corner in the morning with all the neighborhood toddlers (literally, it was a stroller parade up Dot Ave.) for a Matt Heaton concert (“a mix of rockabilly, surf, American roots and Irish traditional music”). But amidst the joy of getting a small child out of the house, I forgot the library book I meant to return, so when the afternoon had time for another outing, we headed to Grove Hall. (One of the few branches open until 5pm rather than 2pm on Saturday!)
Travel notes: One of Dorchester’s six BPL branches, Grove Hall is about 2.3 miles from home, near Franklin Park Zoo. It’s accessible by #22 or #23 bus (some day I will learn the difference between these instead of randomly boarding one or the other) and also convenient to the Four Corners/Geneva commuter rail station. But it was 50 degrees in February, so we went via jog stroller. (Overheard: “That baby ridin’ in style!”)
Teresa’s rating: Ambitious. This library has a small collection in a large, new (2009), beautiful space (shared with the Grove Hall senior center and adjacent to Burke High School). There was lots going on (Saturday activities included a babywearing meetup, Girls Who Code, and a discussion group about comics by and about people of color), and the neighborhood, not considered one of the area’s nicest, shows a lot of investment (murals, Hubway station, community meeting places).
Reese’s rating: 11/10. Lots of big kids were using computers in the children’s room, but the baby area was pretty much just a rug. The empty tween area, however, had benches for cruising and beanbags for crashing!
Teresa’s book: How to Be Both by Ali Smith. My book club is reading Ali Smith’s Winter this month, so I thought I’d have her most famous novel on hand, too. (Confessing my ignorance of contemporary British writers: I'm pretty certain that until recently I was not fully cognizant of Ali Smith being a separate person from Zadie Smith and/or Monica Ali.)
Reese’s books: Cars Go was an obvious choice since we finally had to return former favorites Trucks Go and Diggers Go. I personally don’t think it’s the best in the series, but Reese requested that Jack read it five times in a row for bedtime. (Actually, I don’t know what’s going through her head when she keeps putting the same book into your hand, but I imagine she experiences it sort of like plugging a video game cartridge into Dad.) And we’ve talked about Llama Llama Red Pajama before, but if you haven’t heard Ludacris freestyling it yet, do yourself the favor.
Nearby attractions: We parked the stroller at the base of the Geneva Cliffs Urban Wild, and climbed up the rock puddingstone ledge. It is an urban wild both in the sense of being an undeveloped little pocket at the major Bowdoin-Geneva intersection and also in the sense of being strewn with construction debris and wrappers from microwave pizza-flavored snacks.
