When I'm out with my mother, perhaps eating lunch in Nordstrom's café, or walking through the mall, it's like being with a rock star.

"You're my librarian, aren't you?" is what we hear again and again. "You're from the Woodland Hills branch." Or more simply, from people I have never seen before, "Hi, Marie. How are you?"

People wave, smile and nod in recognition. Everyone knows her, and everyone loves her, which is understandable because she has been working at the Woodland Hills Branch of the Los Angeles Public Library for the last 30 years.

Until last week, that is. Mom finally retired May 10, from a job she has loved for decades.

I actually never thought she would really retire. She has been talking about it for the last few years, but her end date kept getting pushed further and further back - after the next project, or maybe to a different time of year, until I finally decided she never would leave what for her had become a home away from home.

"Someone once asked me to rate my job on a scale from 1-10 (10 being the highest)," she told me, "and without even having to think about it, I said 10."

The man who asked her was very surprised; apparently it's unusual to love your job.

Though she was a teacher when I was a young child, it seems as if she's always been a librarian. I think she was actually only on hiatus during her teaching years, waiting to return to her roots.

When she started at Woodland Hills in 1979, she was delighted to discover all her former students now coming into the library for assistance, who were, in turn, pleased and surprised to find their beloved teacher now behind the reference desk.

Her patrons loved her for all she did for them, and she loved them in turn for all she learned from them.

"We remember your smile," a patron once told her. "You have such a nice smile, and you're always smiling." At one of her four (yes, four) retirement parties last week, patrons and friends came bearing gifts, cards, and happy memories.

"I've known Marie for 30 years," one of them told me, "It doesn't seem possible that she won't still be here on Monday."

"Thirty years, she's been working a long, long time" was one of the lines in a musical tribute sung to her at retirement party No. 3.

And a lot of things have changed over those three decades. "Some of us old-timers were forced to learn and hone our computer skills in order to answer questions," she laughs ruefully. "But we got more exercise with the card catalog because you had to get out of your seat and go to it. Now you can just look at the computer at your desk."

A lot of patrons passed by that desk over the years; she remembers movie star Patric Knowles, ("unfailingly courteous to everyone") who was a regular at Woodland Hills in the 1980s. He was in those swashbucklers with Errol Flynn, and he too loved my mother. Sen. Kramer, a former state senator from Indiana, and his wife were also longtime loyal library patrons who spoke up for the library at every opportunity.

The first gift retirement gift Mom received was from a lady who was sorry to see her go because she had been influential in helping her two - now grown - children, with their school work years ago.

"Your mother is so wonderful," people are always telling me, "She works so hard to get me the information I need."

Well, that's what a true reference librarian does, she helps people get information. And that's what she is to her bones, a reference librarian. If she doesn't know about something, she will find out about it for you.

One of my favorite stories is when she proudly told me she had learned about Rastafarian culture one day when looking it up for a patron. "They smoke marijuana for their religion, you know," she told me. I never knew what my mom was going to learn next.

Her big retirement party on May 18 was one to remember. Almost 70 people gathered in the multipurpose room upstairs of her beloved Woodland Hills Branch to pay tribute to her long years of service for the Los Angeles Public Library.

"I'm very proud of our Woodland Hills staff, which has such a friendly and professional relationship with our patrons" she says. "Two years in a row, they elected us No. in customer service among 70-plus branches."

I know a lot of that good customer service was because of my mother's special touch. I can only hope that in my own career as a reference librarian, I can be half as happy as she was, and do as much good as she did.

Then maybe I, too, can achieve her legendary rock-star status.