Dinosaurs, the Solar System, and Big, Cushy Chairs

As their children devour books about ancient creatures and the cosmos, Thomas and Amantha Tsaros make a legacy gift to Cary Memorial Library.

By Jeri Zeder

A low winter sun beams through the kitchen window. Six-year-old Sophia kneels forward in her chair, arranging in neat rows across the table the cards from her dinosaur deck: Ankylosaurus, Triceratops, Velociraptor, on down to T. Rex. Through the doorway, displayed on the living room console table, is a bright ceramic snail sculpted by her brother Alex, age four. It shares top billing with an egg carton festooned to resemble a Stegosaurus.

It’s all evidence that Sophia and Alex can’t get enough of dinosaurs. And like so many parents of imaginative children, Thomas and Amantha Tsaros know exactly how to nourish their insatiable curiosity: with regular visits to Cary Memorial Library.

“Tom takes the children to the Library every Saturday,” says Amantha. “Our little boy—it wouldn’t be Saturday to him if he wasn’t at the Library.” And it’s not just the children. Tom says that using the Library to nurture his children’s interests in dinosaurs, the solar system, and whatever else catches their fancy has increased his own knowledge, too. Amantha remarks, “We’ve lived in Lexington for four-and-a-half years, and I’ve spent more time in the Library than any place else in Lexington.”

Cary Library is so important to the Tsaros’ that, when they updated their wills last year, they decided to designate the Library as a beneficiary. The Tsaros’ are the newest members of the Maria Hastings Cary Legacy Society, established by the Cary Memorial Library Foundation to honor those who make legacy gifts to the Library. “I know that our library is supported by the State and the Town, but I know that our library wouldn’t be what it is today if it wasn’t for individual, voluntary support, both in terms of time and treasure,” says Tom. “So, that’s why we decided to include the Library in our will.”

Alex Tsaros, age 4, and his creation, “Treasure Hunt.” He explains, “It’s a machine that can smell treasure under the sand.” Photo by Jeri Zeder .

Sophia Tsaros, age 6, poses with her latest painting. “It’s my very first rose,” she says. Photo by Jeri Zeder.

THE ENGINEER AND THE PAINTER

Tom, 48, grew up in Concord, New Hampshire, graduated from UMass Lowell, and entered the then-emerging field of energy conservation in the late 1980s. He’s now a business development director with Framingham-based Ameresco, an energy efficiency and renewable energy company, where he develops small power plants. His primary customers are non-profits, municipalities, public housing, and institutions such as Children’s Hospital, Brigham & Women’s Hospital, and the Museum of Science. By helping customers save on energy costs, his company makes it possible for them to invest their savings in better energy equipment. “It’s a successful business model that benefits society while making a profit,” Tom says.

Amantha, 44, grew up in nearby Burlington, studied art and painting in New York City, and became in illustrator. Her work appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Esquire magazine, and other prestigious publications. Yet it wasn’t as satisfying as she had hoped it would be. After taking some career detours and returning to the Boston area, Amantha met Tom through a mutual friend at the Boston Sports Club in Lexington—on May 1, 2001, to be exact. A little more than a year later, they were married.

Drawn to the convenient location and good schools, the couple settled down in Lexington. Amantha rekindled her love affair with painting when she started doing art projects with her daughter Sophia. She paints regularly now in her home studio. “I get up before the children to paint when it’s still dark out,” she says. She’s been showing her work, including once at Cary Library, built a website (www.amanthatsaros.com), and aspires to exhibit her canvasses in galleries. “My work is actually changing from more landscapes and florals to an abstract approach to paint,” she says. “I’ve always found that one of the things that’s really important when you’re drawing a cat, for example, that you have to capture the ‘catness’ of the cat. In my abstract paintings, I’m trying to get to the ‘subject-ness’ of whatever the thing is.” Her paintings feature lively strokes of color and a playfulness reflected in their titles: “Passionfruit Soup,” “Fudgy Berry,” and “Peanut Butter Shake.” Amantha regularly visits the Library, searching for inspiration. “Sometimes I just go and look at the stacks and find things I wouldn’t have imagined to look for,” she says. “It’s very surprising what is in that library!”

GIVING BACK

Amantha has served on the board of Lexington Open Studios, and LexFUN. She volunteers at her son Alex’s preschool, is an assistant teacher at the St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church in Lexington Center, and is a room parent at Estabrook.

Tom, meanwhile, is a parish board member at St. Nicholas Church, and also serves on the board of directors of Paint Rock Pool, one of Lexington’s neighborhood pools.

Their legacy gift to the Library is a forward-looking gift, and Amantha and Tom each have hopes for the Library’s future. “I think in the future, the human contact portion of the Library will be even more important,” Amantha says. She thinks that digitizing is no substitute for books on shelves. “I think the physicality of the Library and the community part of it should be even more pronounced,” she says.

Tom wants to preserve the Library’s, well, library-ness: “To some extent, the tools in the Library have evolved; the automated check-out, the on-line search. But what’s really nice is that it’s remained kind of the same. The smell, the feel of it. That part I wouldn’t want to change,” he says. “The books are there, the chairs are there, the story times, all the events that go on there—the Library is something that is good like it is.”

Jeri Zeder is a volunteer on the Planned Giving Committee of the Cary Memorial Library Foundation.