It's possible that my love of Chicken Little was the impetus behind my Mom's decision to sign me up for the Dr. Seuss book of the month club when I was a child. I suspect that she was beyond tired of my unquenchable first for another adventure where the sky was falling on the foul friends.It wasn't really the Cat in The Hat and other Dr. Seuss books which made me anticipate the monthly book in the mail, but rather the books by other authors which were often featured. Look Out for Pirates became my Favorite, and later my sons and students had to hear it so many times that my copy fell apart, I laminated the crumbling pages and sewed them back together.
I still 52 years later, remember the delight of Fish Out of Water, and Robert the Rose Horse and Sam and the Firefly and Little Black, A Pony and A Fly Went By and . . . Endless hours of reading and rereading, first with mom, then to myself, then to my students and my sons and now to the grandchildren.
From there, First grade became a marvel of weirdness and wonder. We learned in a phonetic program called ITA, that book was spelled "bwk" and school was 'skwl" and Oh, how I argued with the teacher. But there were a plethora of wondrous tales all translated into that muddle, Clifford the Big Red Dog, Danny and the Dinosaur, and many adventures with Curious George and the Man in the Yellow Hat, were waiting for me. Life was fun, but life as a reader was more than one life, it was an endless dance from one life to another.
Scholastic book clubs became my reward for going to school. I loved books but hated school. I was horrible at social skills and soon my main, often only friends, were between the covers of scholastic readers. I could pretend not to see the other kids avoiding or mocking me, if my nose was buried in a book.
As I moved on from Magic Elizabeth and The Ghost of Dibble Hollow, to Nancy Drew and Trixie Belden, and then to Jaws and Flowers in the Attic, I began to tell myself stories, and share them with other children and then to write them down. Deciding to teach Creative writing and Literature seemed a natural progression, but after Student Teaching, I kept finding myself teaching Severely Handicapped students instead, and reading the old childhood favorites to them.
Then I adopted a son and gave birth to a second son, and began writing seriously. My Dad who also loved books, got esophageal cancer, and in a heart wrenching time, one of the most heartbreaking conversations was when he sighed and looked at his "to be read stack" and said, "I guess I've read my last book."
I'm getting to that point myself and am trying to reverse it. I don't read unless its picture books to the grandkids, or facebook posts. My attention wanders, I rarely even write comments on the photographs I post or about the ones my friends post. I tell myself I'm not dying but often I don't believe me. I have seen so many Doctors and still am working on a diagnosis which looks more and more likely to be Parkinson's Disease.But if I'm wrong, and I am dying, I am so grateful for the gift that I have been given of living in a time and place where books are abundant and girls are expected to learn to read. There is only one gift I've cherished more, and those are the people who have shared the best story time snuggles with me.
