The Librarian in Life’s Garden
by Eugene Monti
Her hazel eyes flashing in the clear, California sunlight, Thea Montandon leans toward her guests, doing what she does best, doing what she loves – bringing people together.
I am the only reporter in the group of five who has been invited to her lovely Walnut Creek home for the week end. They are here to brainstorm the founding of a public library on the Greek Island of Skopelos, in the Aegean Sea. I am here to write about her, and her passions. So far, I can’t be sure if this plenary session is going ahead or around in circles. For almost two hours we have been laughing, talking, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes. But I have the feeling that Thea is subtly, skillfully moving each person into a comfortable space, so when the work gets done, it will seem more like play, serious work though it is.
These are not the first hours we have spent together. When I first contacted her about doing a piece for this magazine, she suggested that we meet “to get the boring details out of the way.” Those “boring details” were her fascinating and rich history.
She grew up in Carmel, California, long before this quaint seaside village became the swank and very expensive resort it is today. In those days, people moved to Carmel, and nearby Big Sur, because they were cheap places to live. But it was not just inexpensive rentals that made Carmel special. It was a Bohemian paradise. While she was still in high school, Thea numbered among her acquaintances Henry Miller, Fritz Perls, Virginia Satir, Richard and Mimi Farina and Bob Dylan.
Given this circle of friends, it seemed natural that she would study literature in college. But this was the 60’s in California, U.S. of A., and she was gripped by stronger passions. In one of the very first marches to protest the Vietnam War, Thea walked two hundred miles from Monterey to Berkeley. Soon afterward, Berkeley became her home.
She lived there ten years. Married. Had three children and turned her mind to early childhood education, her major at the University of California. In between classes and kids, she helped found a national drug-abuse prevention program.
In 1970, Thea, her husband Robert, and their children Alexandrous, Alethea and Abraham moved to New Zealand. (Her fourth child, Mischa, was born there.)
New Zealand proved to be fertile ground for an aspiring teacher. When Thea couldn’t find a pre-school for her youngest, because New Zealand had no such programs, she created one in her home. At the same time, she began a correspondence course in Montessori education through the St. Nicholas School in London. Her nursery school caught on fast. The National Department of Education invited Thea to help them integrate Montessori education into the country’s teachers’ training curriculum. They gave her the go ahead to start more Montessori schools throughout New Zealand. It was a foreshadowing.
Returning home to Walnut Creek in 1975, Thea began what she now jokingly calls “my rough and restless years”. Her energies seemed boundless, her tireless spirit pouring itself into corporate management, documentary film making, running a congressional campaign, creating a community symphony orchestra, and city planning. And of course, her well loved Montessori educational programs.
This was her public face.
Her private life, as her children grew up and left home, began to include studies in philosophy and comparative religion, play writing, poetry. It seemed like no activity, once touched by her, would ever disappear from her life. I wonder if this was how the people around her felt, the ones she brought together, who remember her serenity and her fire. I thought I sensed it – the unspoken call of eternal work - during the hours of our weekend in her comfortable back yard in Walnut Creek.
Librarians are just not regarded as movers and shakers. Say the word “librarian” to almost anyone in the United States, and what will come to their mind is a middle aged spinster with graying hair and glasses. So how had this vibrant and beautiful woman become a librarian?
“It made perfect sense,” she told me, “once I had seen the depth of the endeavor.”
“By that I mean, there arose in me, in an archetypal way, the knowledge of what libraries mean, not only to individuals, but to cultures. Look, this time we are in is so often called the “Age of Information.” Even in physics, philosophy, the humanities, the deepest understanding is that information is fundamental, it’s foundational. And this is what libraries do, you know, they collect, organize and disseminate information. In a sense, they are the modern expression of our distant ancestors on the Serengeti plains, those early ones who came out of Africa,” here she paused, loving the drama of what she was saying, savoring the moment, “to build libraries!”
It was not a straight path to the career she has followed the last 10 years, but it was not a Borgesian labyrinth either. Events had to unfold in a certain way. Fortunately, or fatefully, the right people were there. Before there could be a library, there had to be a school for it to serve.
The Meher School, in Lafayette California, is a private primary school which came into being in 1975. It was the labor of love of Thea’s mentor, Mrs. Ivy Duce, a teacher and an internationally recognized authority on Sufism. Naturally, Thea took part in the planning. And yet, despite her participation in the school’s birth, another character in the drama needed to appear before she would actually work at the school.
Dr. James MacKie moved to Walnut Creek from Baltimore, Maryland, where he had been the Chief Psychologist at University of Maryland Hospital. His specialty? Early childhood education. Once settled on the West Coast, Dr. MacKie began to teach classes in comparative religion and philosophy. From then until Dr. MacKie’s death in 2001, Thea took every class he taught. It did not hurt the plot that Dr. MacKie was a life-long friend of a man Thea had become friends with after her divorce in 1987, the neuroscience researcher and altruistic East Oakland psychiatrist, Dr. Henri Montandon. They married in 1989. Dr. MacKie provided plenty of encouragement, and in 1990 Thea gave up her public persona and became the Librarian at the Meher School. This has been her base of operations ever since.
And what a base of operations it is! The Meher School is a private school that has made it possible for any student to attend, no matter what their financial status. The school is so solid academically that it is accredited by every organization in the United States and California that accredits primary schools. Yet unlike so many other private schools, that encourage cut throat competition for grades from pre-school on, the Meher School stresses respect, kindness to others, appreciation of difference, and service. It is another one of those places which, once a person is touched by it, never leaves them.
“I came to Skopelos, fancifully or fatefully, in 1998. I fell in love, with the land, the people, the color of the Aegean, the goats and sheep outside my windows. I got a lot of writing done, but there were no books to buy! On Skopelos, the people who read books, collect them, and have impressive personal libraries. But there wasn’t a public library! ‘Aha! I thought! This is perfect.’ I had an epiphany. Maybe I could help people build a public library and offer something from America beyond violent movies and corny sitcoms!”
Around that time, by a strange synchonicity, Greece was joining the European Union. A condition of acceptance was the nation’s commitment to life long learning, in other words, to libraries. Thea had a new tool – the Internet. Soon after she completed her website about the project (www.theasite.homestead.com) she began to hear from people all over the world who offered their advice and assistance. The people I was sitting with in her backyard on that sunny California day were part of that group.
I understood now why she thought of the details of her own life as boring. They were history, they were in the past. Only the work of the present matters, only it lives.
In a poem he wrote about her, her husband dubbed her “the founder of lions.” The lines read this way:
My lover is the founder of lions,A lion without stars for her who dedicates the stars to others.I understood these lines now, as well. Thea moves through life like a human catalyst. It is not the fate of a catalyst to linger. Once the new project is started, it is already time to move on. I had wondered over her lack of concern for recognition for all she has done. Now I understood that, too. Awards and accolades are in the past, and the past is a frozen lake. And so, she “dedicates the stars to others” and moves on to what is next. Whatever it may be.
copyright 2002
Eugene Monti
eugenemonti@yahoo.com
EDG Magazine
