"You Missed a Page"

Right now, I use this as a warm-up (related in a few ways, actually) to something I am struggling with and will post when completed. I just need to get the juices flowing, which seems within the parameters I set for myself when I started this.

Tonight, Lily and I were tired. We'd been at our friends' house, and we got back home, Annika was just awake and not tired at all, and for a few hours we let her climb on us, follow us around, demand our near-constant attention, and we were both surprised when it was finally bedtime. I was sort of hoping Lily would say she was too tired for a book, which she does on occasion, and I think she had even thought about it, but ultimately she trudged wearily over to me with her choice in her hands: a fairly scientific book on sharks, called, creatively, Sharks.

Needless to say, I did not feel like reading Sharks. I did not feel like reading at all, but if the selection had been mine, which it is sometimes, I surely would have gone for Jenny the cat and her birthday, or Charlie and Lola or George and Martha--short, funny, done. We got into bed, Annika between us, which worked for one second, after which she was deposited unceremoniously on the floor. I opened the book again. The words swam in front of my eyes, no pun intended: the skin that was eight inches thick, the four rows of teeth, and on and on.

And then, for the first time in my life I succumbed to a parental bad habit I'd always been horrified by. I skipped some lines. My father used to do this when we were very small. He was curbed of the habit by the fact that my sister and I were extremely early readers, who began catching and calling him on it surely years before he would have liked. I remember even as a five year old thinking there was no greater sin, at least one I could imagine at the time (I've since become more worldly, slightly), feeling as though the sin of omission, in this case, should be punishable by law.

I couldn't believe it even as I was doing it. But I found myself excruciatingly bored by the sharks, whose tome I've read many times and never fully enjoyed, and falling asleep as I read, and feeling Lily jerk her eyes open, falling asleep herself, and worried about what Annika might find to eat on the floor that was not actually food, and I did it. It was the only time I have ever done it, and I think it is safe to say that I will not do it again, but I did it, committed the ultimate literary sin.

As a penance, when Lily asked, as she sometimes does, that I read the inside back cover of the book on which biographical information about the author or technical information about the publication is sometimes included, I did it. Down to the zip code of the city in which the book was published. And ultimately, which seems right in the end, I don't even think I saved any time.