Sign in Subscribe

Easter Egg Fridays: The Library

Michael Sperger

• 2 min read

Hello, You -

On the suggestion of a loyal listener, I'm moving the Easter Egg Friday postings over from BlueSky to right here on the Neighborful Station website. This way, they will be a little easier to read and revisit later.

This new format also gives me the opportunity to play around with looking at Easter eggs across multiple episodes, instead of just focusing on a single one. Let's give it a try!

Main Library Energy 📚

The library is an important character in Neighborful Station. We make our first visit in Flapjacks and Festivals (Episode 2), when You go to the monthly Welcome Breakfast for new residents, along with Grace. We actually haven't been back inside the main library since then, though we've been outside it a few times, particularly in 4th of July Parade (Episode 14), when the "quiet zone" for the parade fittingly happens in front of the library. Shhhh....

However, we've encountered a lot of other "branches" of the library around town. There's the Play Library at the center of The Everyone Playground (Episode 9), where You borrow a helmet to go racing on grown-up big wheels. When You go to see the Perseids meteor shower in Northern Lights (Episode 17), the late-night gathering on the Ridgeline Deck overlooking town is hosted by the library. When Olivia and Mason turn up with a bike and helmet for Moose in Bike Bus (Episode 20), they mention that they've come from the bike shop... in the main library.

On that note, here's something I wrote for Flapjacks and Festivals that didn't make it into the final script, but has been guiding my work ever since:

"It turns out that you had passed the library several times, without knowing what it really was. On the actual corner of College and Curtin is a bike shop, its glass roll-up garage doors open to the sidewalk and street. Inside, a group of kids are learning how to repair their own flat tires. Next door, but part of the same brick building, is another set of open garage bays. In this one, power tools of all shapes and sizes are visible on hardy steel shelves under bright work lights. Weekend remodelers, gathered inside, are sipping coffee and trying to decide what they need. Only after passing all of this, and seeing a row of baby strollers and high chairs on the sidewalk down the way, do you and Grace reach a grand set of wooden doors through which you can finally see some books."

So, we have a main library which includes:

All of those things already exist in real libraries around the US. Some time back, I read that when Margaret Atwood wrote The Handmaid's Tale, everything in the book had actually happened somewhere. I thought I would like to do a more positive version of that, with Neighborful Station.

Everything in the world of the show has already happened somewhere. It's on us to make it all happen in one place, at the same time.

Also? Libraries are awesome, and this is a place that believes deeply in sharing things in common. We hear it - briefly - all the way back at the beginning, in Welcome (Episode 1):

"They say, 'Please, don’t buy a lawnmower. You can just use ours.'"

Thanks so much for being here. I wish you an amazing weekend. ❤️

That sign can't stop me because I can't read, Michael