I have had a
lifelong love affair with books. My
earliest memory of the spark that lit that flame of love was when my mom sent me to my Aunt Elsie’s house. At
the ripe old age of six, my mom put me on a bus, armed with a paper bag
containing my weekend clothes, and I would wait for the bus driver to tell me
when my stop came. I don’t remember how
often my cousin Marianne met me at the bus stop, maybe it was only that once, but
she did something I had never done before, she made a stop. The stop was at a tiny little storefront
library filled with more books than I’d ever seen in one place, and Marianne
let me take books out on her library card!
I remember borrowing a Madeline book, still popular today. And so my love affair began.
The next
memory I had was going to the main library in my town, twelve blocks away from
where I lived. I don’t know how old I was
then, but I must have been young enough to still frequent the children’s
section, yet old enough to walk there by myself. It became my favorite place. It was cool on those summer days before air
conditioning and it smelled, just like books!
From that
point on I was never without a library card, and never without a book. I lived for summer vacations so I had time to
indulge my favorite pastime. While my
brother, the more gregarious people person, was hanging with friends playing
ball, I was inside reading. Reading
transported me to other places, inhabited by other people, and I loved that. My favorite early books were the Nancy Drew
series of mysteries. Mysteries have
continued to be my favorite genre since.
My mom, because
she had worked much of my growing up life in banking, the hours of which were
sometimes irregular and included at least one evening, encouraged me to become a teacher, so that I could be home
on school vacations when I had a family of my own. I did become a teacher, but was nearly a decade before I had children of my own. In the meantime, all that time off for holidays and summer meant
hours and hours of reading time! I had
picked the PERFECT occupation for passing the time in a book!
When my
first daughter came along, I was not prepared, in so many ways, for how time consuming it was to
take care of a baby! Reading on a quiet
afternoon, or before going to sleep at night became a thing of the past, unless
you counted reading, “Tubby the Tugboat” a billion times as “reading”. Both of our girls incorporated "reading" when playing with each other, and their dolls and stuffed animals, not because they were reading yet, but because they had memorized story lines from their favorite books!
When my
girls were older, I took them to the library and got them a library card,
though they could barely print their names.
We would come home loaded with books and read them over and over till it
was time for the next library trip. We participated
in all the library summer reading programs in the towns where we lived. We took books to the town pool and read them
while we dried off or had a snack. There
is nothing like an afternoon with Ramona Quimby or Amelia Bedelia to pass a
summer at the pool.
Then, when
they were in grade school, I began to structure their summer days by insisting
on at least a half hour of quiet reading every day. One of my favorite things to do now is to
talk books and share favorites with my youngest daughter Becky who has
inherited my love of reading.
A few years
ago, for a reason I can no longer remember, I was convicted about my reading
tastes. I had always been more of a
fiction fan, and not surprisingly, mostly of mysteries – with the occasional
non-fiction thrown in. I began to think
that I needed to expand my reading to include more non-fiction books, so now I challenge
myself every January to read a certain number of fiction and non-fiction books,
and I record their titles and authors in my journal. That way I can read authors I especially
enjoy, and avoid those I don’t! At first I thought I'd have trouble finding enough non-fiction books I would enjoy, but it seems that one topic leads to another until I love both genres equally now. And I love
to watch my lists fill out over the course of a year and celebrate when I reach
my goal, especially in those years when I finish ahead of year end!
When we left
New Jersey for Florida, one of the first things I did was get a library
card. I have a kindle which is convenient, but I still
prefer the feel of books, the smell of books, and the quiet atmosphere of a
library, to reading my kindle, and I still make my regular visits.
Today I was
sitting on a lounge chair at the pool, having had a luxurious swim, enjoying
lovely breezes and reading (of course!), a book entitled, “When Books Went to
War”, appropriate for a book lover! And I
was thinking how awesome it is to love reading, and now have all the time in
the world to indulge in my most favorite love affair, the one I have with
books!
