Head Tale

One of the bad things about having a recurring “Friday Fun Link” theme post is that things often happen at the end of the week that leave me feeling in a less than fun mood.

The Humboldt Broncos bus crash happened on a Friday, the Colten Boushie verdict came in on a Friday, more mass shootings than I can count have happened on Fridays (though, to be fair, those seem to happen every day of the week.)

But anyhow, after I’d already made my “Throwback Thursday” post yesterday, I got some shocking news that Barb Janicek, a good friend from library school who was two years younger than me had passed away.

It was bad timing in another way – it happened to be my birthday yesterday so I was already in a bit of a mood of self-reflection about my life, my mortality, and my ever-advancing age.

The cause of death wasn’t known by anyone in the group chat where a bunch of former library students were informed of her passing and I don’t want to speculate too much but I do know Barb had lifelong struggles with her weight (which she openly blogged about) so her passing may or may not have been related to that in some way.

Anyhow, here’s a few fond memories I tried to keep in mind yesterday…

• We had an absolute shit show of a genealogy class in library school and I can’t remember if we’d all been joking about doing it or not but I do remember Barb was the only one of us empathetic and hilarious enough to be actually bring a bottle of Bailey’s to our final class.  I was a non-coffee drinker at the time but made a beeline to the nearby Timmy’s so I could partake before class began!
• I’ll always have a strong memory of Barb sitting beside me at the Grad Club after I’d spoken at a new student orientation for her incoming cohort and her absolutely picking my brain about library school – what classes to take, which profs were good, how to succeed – and I was impressed by how curious and intelligent and driven she was.
• Barb opened up about her struggles with her weight a lot after leaving library school, even starting a blog about her weight loss journey after she’d accomplished the amazing feat of losing 100lbs!
• Knowing my background in publishing and how I’d served on the board of Word on the Street Calgary, she offered to drive me to Kitchener so I could partake in their version of the festival.
• I’ve long tried to make daily posts to this blog but one evening when I went out drinking for a class wrap-up, told Shea and I’d be home “around 8pm” then got caught up, first in drinking and then later, a massive blizzard, Shea (who was a few months pregnant at the time!) ended up posting on my behalf which triggered a bunch of hilarious comments from Barb and others. They had a great time joking about me being missing and Barb, smart as always, realised that the time stamps on the comments could be used to prove how late I got home as the night progressed as long as they kept posting anything, even nonsense!  The original commenter names and time stamps got lost in a blog update but you can still get a sense of who said what and when from the content of the comments themselves.)
• Barb ended up moving to Saskatchewan and working as a children’s librarian in Saskatoon for her first job out of library school.  I don’t think we managed to connect in person but we talked fairly regularly about our respective experiences as “baby Saskatchewan librarians” having just convocated from library school at roughly the same time.
• Shea and I leaned on classmates for a lot of different things during our time in Ontario but I’ll always remember that it was Barb who drove us to U-Haul to buy boxes in preparation for our move home.  She also ended up taking a lot of the stuff – everything from furniture to food – that we didn’t or couldn’t take with us.
• As is often the case with so many people I’ve known over the years, I hadn’t stayed in regular contact with her other than seeing occasional Facebook updates.  But she’d posted an article about the struggles of Gen-X women a couple months ago and Shea had reached out to her.  Shea let me read their FB conversation which was wide-ranging and covered a range from topics from health to work to families.  It was great to hear Barb’s “voice” shining through and that she was the same person she’d always been.  One line from Barb stood out, both for its optimism but also as as glimpse at the struggles Barb was going through.  I’m quoting it with Shea’s permission:
  

  Life is hard. It’s what makes it precious and worthwhile, but holy shit – when we hit a rough patch, it’s REALLY rough!

Those are just a few quick memories but I’m sure there are many others.  I often joke about the Spirit of Librarianship Award (calling it the “SoL” award being only one example) and I have a complicated relationship with it and have ever since I won it.  I was honoured to be chosen by my peers but part of me never liked how it singled out one student as somehow embodying the spirit of librarianship more than others (similar to how I feel about book awards or any award that’s got an element of arbitrariness to it.)

But at the same time, Barb won the Spirit of Librarianship award in Summer 2007 and I always thought she was the perfect example of who should win it – someone who was friendly to everyone, helpful to a fault, and just somebody you knew very quickly would be a great librarian – smart, funny, thoughtful, kind.

RIP Barb.