SALISBURY — At about 2:15 p.m. Saturday, Aug. 16, things were looking bleak at the Scoville Memorial Library for Julia Hobart’s children’s program.
Nobody had showed up to make cool stuff like fidget toys.
Hobart was stoic about this. Teenagers can be erratic, and a summer Saturday offers many alternatives.
But then Max Lins and his mother Ari Cruz showed up and saved the day.
Max is 11 years old and heading into 6th grade at Salisbury Central School.
After carefully weighing the options, he decided to make a fidget cube, which is constructed out of little squares of wood, cunningly taped together so they fold around themselves.
Hobart had a bag full of materials, including an Asterix comic, which Max chose for his initial foray into fidget cube decoration.
Max watched carefully as Hobart demonstrated how to place the tape so the thing folds correctly.
“Ahh,” he said. “I think I get how this is going to work.”
And it did.
As it turned out, reinforcements were on the way. As a reporter headed down the stairs to the children’s section and the library’s rear entrance, there was another mother, this time with a young girl, looking puzzled.
“We thought there was a —” started the mother.
“Upstairs, on the right” she was told.
This coming Saturday, Aug. 23, there’s an end-of-summer reading event at the library starting at 1 p.m. and winding up at 4 p.m. with a concert by the Salisbury Band. Readers need to check in between 1 p.m. and 2 p.m. to qualify for raffle prizes.
