Three sounds guaranteed to make me smile no matter how bad my day is: (1) the sound of a properly shaken martini being poured into my waiting glass; (2) my son’s voice saying “Good night, Mommy!” when I’ve got another two hours or more of alertness left in me; and (3) the ca-thunk of my rubber stamp marking one of my many bills fully paid.

I think I first fell in love with that latter sound when I was a kid checking out books at the school library. Miss Narfeld — who looked every inch the school librarian, all the day down to her cardigan sweaters draped over bony shoulders and buttoned one time just at the neck — would glance briefly at me before taking the stack of books I’d so carefully picked out. She never made eye contact, never said a word until she’d studied the titles of the books, as if they alone told her all about me she needed to know.

Checking out Huckleberry Finn earned a smile from Miss Narfeld, while each and every one of the Nancy Drew books met with a low clucking sound at the back of her throat, even when paired with a classic. Then there was the day I tried checking out The Catcher in the Rye — I was 9 at the time — and Miss Narfeld discovered the book had a “broken spine,” which meant no one could check it out. Two weeks later, the book still hadn’t reappeared on the shelves and after that I’d found other books that had the f-word in them so I’d forgotten all about Salinger’s masterpiece.

Miss Narfeld had one of those date stamps with the embossed bands that informed in red, heavily inked numbers the precise date on which the book was due. Each time she stamped a book — and I usually checked out several at a time — she’d flip to the back cover, stamp the due date and look at me over the rim of her rhinestone-studded cateye glasses: “Now this book is due on…”. Every book. Every time.

The sound of her stamp was, to me, like the sound of a starting gun for a race horse: I was off with my books, racing to complete them, always determined to finish each and every one I’d checked out because sometimes — and one never knew when it was coming — Miss Narfeld would come up with a question or two to find out if kids were actually reading the book they’d checked out.

“Oh, and what did you think when the evil wizard cast a spell on Frodo and gave him wings?”

“Um, ma’am,” I’d reply, “that didn’t happen in this book.”

“No? Well, I read so much. Perhaps I got my stories confused.”

For years I just thought Miss Narfeld was nutty. Now I realize she was a genius, and quite possibly the finest librarian I’ve ever known.

No wonder, then, that I love the sound of my own rubber stamps now. Just as with Miss Narfeld’s stamp, the sound of it serves as a signal to me. Marking a bill fully paid is much like finishing a book: one thing has ended, I’m better off for it, and now it’s time to focus my energies on racing to finish paying off the next one. Even address stamps, like the one I use on all of my snail mail, signal the end of something and the beginning of something new: I’ve finished a letter or discharged a debt: either way, something is leaving my hands and something new will soon take its place.

These are the sounds we are losing in this politically correct, electronic age. My son will never hear a librarian clucking in disapproval when he opts for a “Teen Titans” graphic novel instead of something more intellectually meaty — that might be construed as having an opinion, and we no longer allow librarians to express those. And so the stoic, bedraggled woman in jeans and t-shirt behind the library counter now says nothing more controversial than “Hello” and “Goodbye”, if she can even be troubled to do that. The computer does her work for her, swiping our library card through, scanning the bar codes on the book without her so much as glancing at the books as they pass through her hands. A machine spits out a receipt informing us of the due date.

It’s all very efficient, yes, but not nearly as memorable as Miss Narfeld and her date stamp. But, hey, at least I’ve got mine.