Read This

A family member reminded me today that as a little girl I used to stay up late every night, long after I was meant to be asleep, reading in bed with a flashlight under the covers. I have been thinking about reading a lot lately, for a number of reasons. One is that it was the first thing that came to mind when someone asked me what I missed most about my pre-parenthood life. Even more than sleep. Another is that a kid I am tutoring is refusing to read, digs in his heels and simply won't do it at home; I have to make him read out loud to me to get him to do it at all. I have made it sort of a mission to get this kid to like reading, and I have a had a few periods of success--he loved The Westing Game, which is a great book--but for the most part I am failing. He currently claims to dislike To Kill a Mockingbird. I feel like telling him: Look buddy, that's just not allowed. The third is that Lily is learning to read, and I find the process fascinating. She notices words everywhere, and is in that transitional state between sounding out words and realizing that her brain just knows them. When this happens she still looks a little surprised, as though she's done magic. Which, of course, she has.

I cannot remember a time when I did not love to read, crave reading, from the moment I woke up until I fell asleep, almost every single night, with a book on my chest and the light still on. We still have a warped hardback copy of a book called Betsy's Little Star from the Goodnow Library in Sudbury that we had to buy when I was five because I'd dropped it in the bathtub while reading it. To this day, there is nothing I find more relaxing than reading in the bathtub. As a kid I used to walk holding a book; my cousins made fun of me, and occasionally I did walk into something, like a tree. Not kidding. Today, I walk down my street reading after I've been on the subway, and there are a few neighbors who have picked up on this, make jokes when I pass them, and I lower my book or magazine and smile. Once, while looking back down at the book after one of these smiles (which says: you think it's funny, or cute, that I am walking and reading so I will smile to acknowledge this, but I have about thirty seconds before I enter the chaos that is my home, so I will not stop to discuss this with you, no offense intended), I again, taller, older, ostensibly wiser, walked into a tree.

For me, reading has never been a hobby or a pastime. It was the defining element of my childhood, of my earliest sense of self. I did it all the time: while eating, while riding in the car, while waiting for anything, whenever I could. Our library was my favorite place in the world. By the time I was ten I had read every single book in the children's department, the room with the chapter books, and then I started reading the ones I liked again. There are some books, the Betsy-Tacy books, the Anne of Green Gables books, Noel Streatfeld's "Shoes" books, the All of a Kind Family books, the Wizard of Oz series, including the obscurities, Louisa May Alcott's oeuvre, I may have read a dozen times each.

I'm not sure where I'm going with this, but I guess I can wrap it up for now by saying that I don't think it's a coincidence that I always wanted to be a writer myself. As Lily is starting to see, words are magic--the ability to read them is, the ability to write them is. I am remembering this again. I needed to. It feels amazing. That's all for now.