Stellar moments in librarianship

[owlectomy]

Sometimes you'll see a kid who gloms onto you, not because of anything you do, but because they've got a bad home life and, resulting from that, a disturbing lack of boundaries.
This kid brought me a book about mummies and dead bodies and insisted that I read it to her. She was maybe six, seven years old, and she was asking for descriptions for all the pictures.

"Why doesn't this person have eyes?"
"Because he's been dead a really long time."
"What's that?"
"It's a dead baby."
"What's that?"
"It's another dead person."
"Is it the baby's mother?"
"No."
"Why not?"

Personal experience tells me that some kids are just morbid, for varying reasons and to varying degrees, and it doesn't help to treat that as something wrong or shameful or taboo, but looking at pictures of dead bodies with a young child definitely exceeded my Recommended Daily Allowance of skin-crawling.

Comments

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

Err yuck. The things you do for your profession make the things I do for mine look like a walk in the park.